AURO, the leading enterprise Canadian cloud computing service, just announced their new partnership with network virtualization expert, Midokura. AURO is the leading IaaS cloud computing provider in Canada and is built on OpenStack. They have chosen Midokura's award-winning networking technology to help them further achieve high availability (HA) across compute regions, instances and storage setup. MidoNet offers the best software-defined networking (SDN) solution and makes AURO's goal of delivering an easy-to-use cloud computing service possible. Utilization of MidoNet helps support AURO's enterprise-grade multi-zone and multi-region cloud deployments across Canada, including Vancouver, BC and Toronto, ON.
As a public cloud computing platform built on the increasingly popular OpenStack cloud operating system, AURO has been focused on building a Canadian-based networking service that is able to support enterprise-grade service levels, deliver true high availability and leverage the latest software networking technologies to support their cloud customers. Because of the size of their cloud, AURO needed their network to continue being highly distributed and as flexible and automatable as the compute virtualization, such as for services like virtual private networks (VPC) and load-balancing as a service (LBaaS) within individual tenants.
"We are currently working on building our Cloud Computing 2.0 framework using OpenStack for Vancouver and Toronto and needed a partner that will ensure our deployment is rock-solid and help give our customers the confidence of 99.99% and higher availability. MidoNet was the best network virtualization solution available and helped us achieve our goals of multi-zone and multi-region deployment," said Matt McKinney, Chief Strategy Officer at AURO.
To accomplish this, AURO reviewed several methods to provide private network functionality – Nova networking with VLANs and Neutron using OVS or Linux bridges. However, the Nova network presents limitations, and at some point is expected to be removed from OpenStack entirely. That leaves Neutron, which is capable of providing the required functionality, but in its current format, is unable to support an enterprise-grade service level agreement.
In reviewing potential solutions for AURO's next compute region that includes Neutron, AURO found Midokura's solution to be innovative and flexible. It fulfills the high availability requirement, but with reduced overall complexity. MidoNet is also open-source. Thus, by implementing Midokura's solution, AURO can continue building a cloud with no vendor lock-in, while also meeting their customers' needs.
