New Features from CloudSwitch Make it Even Easier to Use the Cloud
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BuzzBy John Considine
We’ve been hard at work over the past two years building the underlying infrastructure for our CloudSwitch software, with the design goal of innovating rapidly on top of this architecture. The latest release of CloudSwitch Enterprise has proven that we’re able to introduce new capabilities quickly, and provides some insight into features that are on the way.
This release contains some great features and improvements that have been driven by our early customers. We’ve introduced a feature that has been the #1 request from customers and prospects—public IP access. To understand the background on this feature, we have to start with the CloudSwitch security model: we’ve designed our system for maximum security when deploying applications to the cloud. In the earlier versions of our software, this design meant that all access to the machines deployed into the cloud was routed through the data center. This allowed the customers to utilize their firewalls and rules to govern what happens in the cloud. For many enterprises, this remains the preferred mode for deploying the CloudSwitch solution. However, many of our customers want to deploy internet-facing applications and are looking to the cloud to help reduce bandwidth constraints within their data centers and improve performance by moving their computing closer to the customers. By routing all traffic back to the data center, we were neither improving the bandwidth constraints nor were we letting customers take advantage of the geographical distribution of their computing.
What we needed to do was to let our customers control the internet access to their servers in the cloud—which sounds a lot like a firewall. In keeping with our philosophy of maintaining existing enterprise policies and procedures, we did not want to introduce a new and partial firewall solution into the customer’s environment. We wanted to allow the customers to deploy existing firewall solutions into the cloud so that they have the knowledge, trust, and control over their cloud resources.
The new public IP access feature allows the end user to assign a public IP address to one of the interfaces on a standard firewall appliance. The other interface can be 
placed on the network LAN for your servers in the cloud. This allows the customer to define rules, services, and polices for how public internet access is granted to resources in the cloud. This is immensely powerful – it brings services like VPN access, dhcp, dynamic DNS, proxies, full firewall rule sets, and logging to cloud deployments. You’re no longer limited to the set of functions that a cloud provider offers for control of firewall resources or load balancers.
A second new feature is the CloudSwitch Library. This is a resource area that contains virtual machines and infrastructure elements that can be deployed to the cloud. You may have seen the beginnings of this in the June commercial release 
of our product where we introduced the “Sample VMs” folder. In the latest release, we have expanded the capabilities of this feature to allow for different types of virtual machines and appliances to be deployed to the cloud. This release includes a “Network Appliances” folder for network-related infrastructure components –think firewalls, load balancers, and WAN optimizers. We have included a popular open source firewall and load balancer (Smoothwall + HA proxy) to allow our customers to have access to a full feature firewall solution for the cloud.
The final improvement in this release is the addition of better geographic control over where you want to run your applications in the cloud. Since we have customers coming not only from all over the US, but all over the world, we have made it easier to select the geography within our user interface. Users can enable and select these regions 
quickly and easily to deploy workloads into data centers from Ireland to Virginia to Singapore. What is really cool to see in our product is a single network spanning all of these data centers and allowing the virtual machines to operate seamlessly, as if they were all local.
CloudSwitch’s unique architecture and our powerful Cloud Isolation Technology™ make it possible to create and deliver these new features quickly. We’re constantly enhancing our software to make everything “just work” for enterprises in the cloud.
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