This startup says it can glue all your networks together in the cloud

Multi-cloud networking startup Alkira has decided it wants to be a network-as-a-service (NaaS) provider with the launch of its cloud area networking platform this week. The upstart, founded in 2018, claims this platform lets customers automatically stitch together multiple on-prem datacenters, branches, and cloud workloads at …

[Doctor Syntax]

Stitch all your networks together? ISTR someone had the same idea a good long while ago. It was called Arpanet. I wonder what happened to it.

[Mike 137]

Playing Devil's advocate

Another layer of complexity between you and your data, remembering that complexity is inversely proportional to reliability. One has to wonder how effectively (if at all) such an intermediary will interface betweeen you and a cloud provider in event of failure (e.g. yesterday's Cloudflare collapse). If they don't, you'll still have to keep tabs on each of your providers yourself.

[elsergiovolador]

Re: Playing Devil's advocate

But that's how jobs are being created! In a truly Keynesian fasion.

[devin3782]

Imagine the data you could eavesdrop on and sell

[elsergiovolador]

Cloud

A cloud of vomit may suddenly appear if I hear cloud once more.

[Pascal Monett]

"Cloud was supposed to make life easier"

Yes. Supposed to. That's certainly how it has been sold (and is still being sold).

Unfortunately, the reality of the fact that you're depending on someone else's server tends to get in the way.

[Kevin McMurtrie]

Not flashy

I'd switch everything to encrypted traffic over IPv6 but such simple solutions never make your blog posts famous. People would rather read about a cleverly complicated global LAN aggregator.

[MTimC]

Re: Not flashy

That's exactly what I was thinking. Why is this so hard? Global IP traffic for consumers is now mostly IPv6 in many jurisdictions, and firms such as MS made a big deal about how they used it to avoid clashing RFC 1918 networks.

What's less clear is why there's no big push for IPv6 from the cloud vendors and startups helping to seed best practice. There is a barrier in a lot of legacy software, but why keep layering on the pain? (or is it just job preservation that's not been spotted?)

[Snowy]

Glue

and when it breaks someone else can make some more glue to glue the bits together.