Lumen, formerly known as CenturyLink, encountered the need to automate the implementation of its SD-WAN Versa solution in a project for an important client in the banking sector in Colombia. How did the project develop? Why did they choose Genbyte, a company of which I am a founding partner, among other consulting firms to do so already established in the local market?
Requirements
Among the requirements was the automatic implementation of the solution on AWS, which included, in addition to the two instances of the appliance and the necessary network services, the configuration via API of the orchestrator.
The work
The first part consisted of building a template for AWS CloudFormation including services and components such as IAM, VPC, network interfaces, Ec2 instances, elastic IP, and VPN. The second part consisted of configuring the orchestrator not only with CloudFormation’s data (such as the parameters of the VPN and elastic IPs) but also with elements that already existed (Transit Gateway, Routing tables, etc.). In addition, to connect to the orchestrator it was necessary to previously establish a secure VPN connection.
Finally, a development environment was not available for this process due to the complexity and mainly to the confidentiality policies of the end customer. For this reason, it was necessary to have as much detail as possible and to present clear documentation that allows operators to complete the variables to which we did not have access due to restrictions.
As a final observation, implementation assistance was provided both in the test environment and in production.