Hybrid Cloud Networking: Designing Routing Between Data Centre and Cloud
Most organisations now run some workloads on-premise and some in one or more clouds. The network that joins them needs the same care as any WAN.
Plan IP addressing first
Overlapping address ranges between offices, data centres and cloud networks are the most common — and most painful — problem. Allocate non-overlapping ranges for every cloud region and account from a central IPAM.
Use a hub
Connecting every VPC or VNet directly to every site creates a mesh that is hard to manage. Cloud transit hubs (such as transit gateways or virtual WAN hubs) give one attachment point per region.
Routing with BGP
- Exchange routes dynamically over private connections or VPNs.
- Summarise routes where possible to stay within cloud route limits.
- Use BGP attributes to prefer private links over VPN backups.
Security boundaries
- Decide where traffic is inspected: in the cloud, on-premise, or both.
- Avoid hair-pinning all cloud traffic through the data centre unless required.
- Apply consistent segmentation between production, development and shared services.
Observability
Enable flow logs in the cloud and correlate them with on-premise monitoring.
We design hybrid networks end to end through Multi Cloud Connect. Plan yours.
