In this comprehensive guide, we will delve into the step-by-step process of establishing a secure VPN connection between Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Azure. By following these instructions, you will gain the ability to seamlessly migrate workloads from Azure to GCP or run multi-cloud workloads across both platforms, ensuring a flexible and efficient infrastructure for your applications.
Prerequisites:
Ensure you have an active Azure subscription and a project set up on GCP. Make sure you have the required administrative roles on both platforms. You can create the new VPC Network (Virtual Network on Azure) and subnets in both GCP and Azure or you can use the existing one.
While working with a client, we needed to be connected with VPN all the time, it is when we noticed there was always a delay in response when browsing the internet on my system because all the traffic was going through a VPN tunnel to the VPN server located in the far region and this was the case for every employee working for that client. So, what is the solution for this if you are a cost-conscious company? You want minimal use of resources and improve overall network performance. You do split-tunneling, which we will be discussing in this blog, and how you can achieve it.
What is Split tunneling?
Split Tunneling is a powerful feature in OpenVPN that allows clients to decide which traffic should be sent through the VPN tunnel and which traffic should be sent directly to the Internet. This means that the client can choose to route only specific traffic through the VPN, such as traffic destined for a corporate network, while allowing other traffic to bypass the VPN. This can be useful for increasing the speed and reliability of internet access for certain types of traffic, and for conserving bandwidth on the VPN server.
As we all know AWS and Azure are the two Cloud providers and there can be possibilities that one of our services is running on one cloud provider and the other is running on another cloud provider and, both are dependent on each other.
Through this blog, I will guide you on the steps which will be needed for connecting AWS with Azure and also will be explaining all the components of both the cloud provider that will be required for creating the site-to-site VPN Connectivity.
Why are we trying to connect both?
In one of my projects, I met with a requirement where I was working on an application that follows a client-server architecture. There were servers connected to multiple clients. Initially, the Server was placed into AWS and the connected clients were also there, but after a couple of years our requirements got changed and a new business unit came into the picture with its own clients that were needed to be connected with the server present in the AWS cloud.
Now, these new clients were present on Azure but the server was on AWS. Migration of server was not an option for us because our customer was not ready to migrate those clients from Azure to AWS, so this was a completely new use case, to which we decided to connect both the cloud providers with each other by setting up IPSec VPN tunnel.
During this lockdown period, people are usually working from home which means they all are contributing to work by staying at home. So, if someone wants to work on something online, such as on a particular private or public server of a company, depending on the scenario, will need a network route to that server.
makes sense?
Meaning, they first need access to that particular server either via a public network or using VPN. These things have their own set of complexities. Therefore, we will discuss a few aspects of network access & their drawbacks:
VPNs are a great way to securely connect your private networks. They are even used to mask your public IP, so that you can access a public server without getting traced. There are a number of VPN offerings in the market ranging from open-source to proprietary software, self-managed to VPN-as-a-service, and with a huge range of features.
I recently got an assignment to get the best offering in the market. Best is a vague term. An Open-source VPN covering all the basic functionalities can be best for a simple implementation . Or a proprietary VPN having a lot of simplicity and customisation can be best for a medium or high budget implementation. So, I decided to compare different offerings in the market. Complete open-source VPNs are out of the scope.
Here are the things I kept in my mind before starting:
