Deploy Critical Network Services with Infrastructure-Free DDI with Infoblox NIOS-X as a Service

All right, I'm here to talk to you about NY SX as a service. Glenn Sullivan, senior director here of product at Infoblox. Um, very excited about NYS X as a service.

'cause it is the offering, uh, for folks that want no footprint from an appliance, vir, virtual or physical standpoint, right? Um, this solves a, a major, you know, uh, deployment scenario that we, that we, you know, is a real challenge for our customers. So, I'm gonna take you through a little bit of history because to really understand how we've got here with as a service, we need to talk about, you know, what we have as a current deployment model.

So this is nios on the left here. So it's a grid based technology. You deploy an appliance and you give it a role.

There's a grid, uh, there's a grid manager and a grid manager candidate for, for backup for managing the grid. You have different grid members that do different things. Internal DNS, external DNS, uh, local DHCP, um, the reference architecture that Cricket Lu has put out for how to design this has, you know, basically a dozen boxes for a basic deployment for NI Os because it's meant to be highly resilient from a DNS and DHB standpoint.

So we recognize that this deployment model in n os was awesome for on-prem and awesome for grid, you know, management and, and being isolated and making sure that it has everything that you need, you know, deployed in an appliance, in a grid. But obviously as folks move to a more of a branch model, have, you know, locations everywhere that need to be locally survivable, we recognize the need for a lighter weight deployment on-prem. So the thing that sits in your environment that actually puts packets on the wire, it serves the ation B protocol, but all of the management is done from a portal.

This was blocks when DDI, so this came out, uh, you know, August of 2019. Uh, lots of users using this. Love it.

Great local survivability, um, serves a, serves a purpose of having, you know, the distinction, the distinction between what happens in the cloud SaaS model and what's delivered on-prem. But there's a need to go even further, right? I, the feedback that we got from some customers was, this is great, but I have a, you know, a gas station that I can't put anything in.

There's no VMs to run infrastructure on, and there's no closet space for an appliance running DNS and DHCP. And I don't want to just use whatever DNS and DHP because I really like your DNS and DHP, but I don't wanna deploy anything on prem. The other thing that this didn't address is cloud use cases for serving DNS in the cloud.

We'd say if you want to serve DNS in the cloud and you don't want to use, uh, you know, RAF 53 Azure or cloud DNS, you just take a virtual version of our appliance and you put it in the cloud environment, which people do to great effect, and, and it works well. But then of course, you hit the antibodies, the allergies, the heartburn, whatever metaphor you want to use to the cloud teams who don't want to deploy servers. So it was clear that we needed a server, a serverless solution for this infrastructure free solution.

So that's where Nanos X as a service comes in and nex as a service. It, uh, has the ability to take an IP SEC tunnel, uh, from an on, from an on-prem, you know, deployment, right? So it uses whatever infrastructure you have.

You've got a router on-prem, you've got a firewall on-prem, you've got an SD WAN device on-prem. It'll accept the connections into our cloud deployments and it will serve DNS and DHP from those cloud deployments, right? So now you can have a branch that has enterprise grade DDI supplying DNS and DHP to the, to the workers at those locations without having to have anything OnPrem.

Now, this doesn't work in all use cases, right? You could, like we talked about in a previous session, we talked about a hospital, right? That needs local survivability in case they lose internet in case they lose, you know, power in case they lose wan.

Well, we're not taking off the N os virtual deployment off the table, right? They can still deploy on SX server, OnPrem host, DNS and DHP from that and still have it be cloud managed to cloud control. So this is really tailored to a knowledge worker site where if they lose internet, all of their applications they use on a daily basis are SaaS.

So they just, you know, go take a walk or use their hotspot anyway. So this is, uh, really tailored to those types of deployments from an on-prem perspective. But let's not forget the cloud perspective, right?

So we've got lots of folks that want to do DNS in a centralized way. They, they've recognized all the issues that we've talked about with having, you know, different DNS infrastructures between Azure, uh, AWS and GP, and they want a single way to manage DNS, right? So that's fine.

We've given them that solution with, as a service, and we use the cloud connectivity to communicate with those cloud environments. So if they wanna use a transit gateway to do VPC connection from our environment to their environment, we can do that. If you want to use, uh, GCP, uh, private link, we can do that.

Or GCB private service Connect, see they all the clouds have for names for these things, but whatever magical, not native connectivity they want to use to connect from our environment hosting DNS for them, they can do as well. And you might think it's a DNS only use case. 'cause obviously you don't need D HCP in the cloud.

Well, we can also support DHCP for branches that happen to use the cloud as a backbone, right? So say you're using one of the solutions to connect all of your, uh, your branches up to, you know, AWS or GCP to provide DHCP as a, as a managed service, as a, you know, in a shared VPC model. We support that as well.

So they, they can have their branches communicate to their global, uh, centralized GCP deployment and then that GCP deployment can talk to us and we can hand out D-N-S-D-C-P for those on-prem deployments as well. So it's, it's kind of a mix. Whatever solution that you need from a DNS and DHP perspective, we can handle, uh, using iOS X as a service.

Um, the last thing we wanna touch on is the security, uh, in this perspective, because we've talked a lot about APIs today, about, you know, having to know Different APIs for different environments or managing different, you know, consoles for, for managing DNS across the board. Well, as a service simplifies this, right? Because now I've got one place that I'm providing that service, that one place where I'm providing DNS and D, HT P and I'm controlling the mechanisms to which I connect that service to my other environments.

So now I have one place where some, where we gotta do the permissions and the access controls, and the granular, you know, RAC and all of that. We have one place that we have to control instead of, you know, 5, 6, 7, 8 different, you know, infrastructures that we have to manage whenever anyone comes into or leaves the company or, you know, what has an API level control.