Aviatrix Source NAT (SNAT) on BGP Spoke

Aviatrix customer has applications running in various VPCs, these applications need to be able to communicate with FiServ securely via BGP over IPSec tunnels. FiServ also has lots of its own customers that most likely use RFC1918 as internal address space. To avoid conflicts, FiServ assigns non-RFC1918 IP Prefixes to FiServ customers, the incoming connection must be Source NAT (SNAT) to these non-RFC1918 IP Prefixes, and FiServ also only allows incoming traffic from these non-RFC1918 IP Prefixes on FiServ firewalls.

FiServ reference architecture: https://developer.fiserv.com/product/FirstVisionEMEA/docs/?path=docs/Support/Client-Onboarding.md&branch=main#connectivity-overview-diagram

This blog intends to walk through various considerations that affects final design.

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Request/Renew SSL Certificate for Aviatrix Controller/CoPilot

As of writing, on Aviatrix Controller version 7.1.2131 and CoPilot v4.3.1, the current process of installing a certificate:

  1. For Aviatrix Controller
    • By default, the Aviatrix Controller uses a self-signed certificate. In this case, an option to generate a Certificate Signing Request (CSR) will be available.  The CSR requires the Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) of the controller, e.g., avx-controller.mycompany.com.  When the CSR is generated, the controller will also generate and store a corresponding private key.  The generated CSR is supplied to the Certificate Authority (CA) which will return a signed public certificate.  In addition to this certificate, a CA certificate (generally publicly available from the CA) will also be required during the import process.
    • If a public certificate is already installed, you can no longer generate a CSR without first reverting to a self-signed certificate.
    • There is also an option to import an externally generated private key with corresponding public and CA certs. 
  2. For Aviatrix CoPilot
    • The Copilot does not support the generation of CSR’s.  Instead, an externally generated private key and corresponding CA-signed public key are required for importation. 

The processes above can be challenging for customers, especially when renewing existing certificates.  This confusion is compounded by the variety of different certificate types of Certification Authorities, certificate formats and operating system tools.

This blog intends to create a more standardized process for Aviatrix Customers to follow.

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Picking the correct subnet from Aviatrix created VPC

Resource aviatrix_vpc creates a VPC/vNet/VCN in various cloud types. For Aviatrix Transit VPC, there would be various different subnets created for the purpose of integrating with SDWan appliances, insertion of Firewalls, integration with AWS TGW (Aviatrix Orchestrated), or utilizing AWS Gateway Load Balancer etc.

An example of subnets created in AWS for Aviatrix Transit VPC with High-Performance Encryption, TGW-O integration, and Firewall integration with GWLB.

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Gain Visibility and Control of your AWS Public Subnet Workloads

It is common for enterprise customers to run a workload in AWS in a public-facing subnet, where the default route (0.0.0.0/0) would be pointing to the AWS internet gateway (IGW). Reference: AWS Internet Gateway Documentation

The IGW provides NAT between the public IP and the private IP assigned to the instance. You may control inbound/outbound traffic via Security Group, where you can control what protocol and IP range that would have access. However, IGW won’t provide you much visibility of the traffic going in/out from your instance, and you may need to use FlowLogs to gain some level of visibility. Some examples of FlowLogs can be found here: Flow log record examples. You may find it lack of detail and very difficult to read.

For enterprise customers that value visibility and security, as well as simplified IT operations, Aviatrix has designed a Public Subnet Filtering gateway feature for AWS public subnet workload.

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Simply method to log connectivity and have asymmetric in mind

When helping customer migrate to Aviatrix, most of the time, we have standard migration process, which is documented here. Few customer may need customized migration architecture due to their existing architecture and special requirements. These customized migration architecture require additional testing to understand what would be the potential impact to traffic flow. While most enterprise customer may have monitoring system in place, but in the lab/dev/QA phrase, we may not have the luxury to have full fledge monitoring system deployed. In this blog post, I will show you a simple method to log connectivity between desired data paths without breaking a sweat or the bank.

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Import existing resources into CloudFormation template

Aviatrix developed Migration Toolkit to help customer migrate from existing AWS/ Azure environment to Aviatrix Transit and Spoke Multi-Cloud Networking Architecture (MCNA). I have discussed the process in blog: Migrate from Azure vNet hub and spoke architecture to Aviatrix Transit. The AWS migration process is similar, where the toolkit make copies of existing route tables, when Aviatrix Spoke is attached to Aviatrix Transit, we are using these copied route tables, hence no traffic interruption would happen. During the traffic switching phrase, subnets will be associated with the copied route table, and in TGW we disable the migrating VPC router advertisement, so the traffic would swing over to Aviatrix Spoke/Transit.

Some of our customers are using CloudFormation to manage the deployment of their environment, while Aviatrix Controller will handle bulk of the work such as populating RFC1918 and/or default route in the route table and/or non-RFC1918 routes from External connections, they still would like to have the ability to continue to use CloudFormation to manage endpoint routes. This created a split brain scenario, how do we handle this?

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Aviatrix CoPilot Baseline Metric

Enterprise customers values Aviatrix CoPilot for track and gather evidential data on their network. The platform aggregates abundant Syslog and Netflow data, which can be used to establish baseline metrics for alerting. Customers can choose to modify or add/remove metrics to suit their specific needs. Here is a list of recommended baseline metric, as well as detail of each one’s meaning.

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GCP Interconnect to Aviatrix Transit – Option 1

In the last blog post: Learning GCP Interconnect: Step-by-Step Guide for Configuring BGP with ISR and Cloud Router, I have shown steps of creating Interconnect VLAN attachment to existing VPC, as well as how to configure Cloud Routers and VPC peerings to establish connectivity from on-prem to GCP spoke VPC. You may have noticed a few feature difference amongst AWS Direct Connect, Azure Express Route and GCP Interconnect, which leads to different architecture.

In this blog post, I will show you how to connect Aviatrix Edge 2.0 to Aviatrix Transit in GCP, using Interconnect as underlay.

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