Cloud Router Frequently Asked Questions

No. You do not need a physical port or a data center presence to use Cloud Router services.

We can transfer data between your cloud environments, but then you would be responsible for reaching the cloud via another route (such as over the open internet or a VPN connection).

Yes. If you aren’t already connected, you will need to provision an access port in one of our locations and set up a cross connect to our network.

If you already have an access port, you can use that to connect your on-premises network to the Cloud Router.

Yes.

Q-in-Q tunneling is fully supported. Q-in-Q S-tag/S-VLAN is supported for Azure connections. If you require S-tag/S-VLAN for another cloud, contact your Customer Service Manager to discuss options.

Not currently. Contact sales@packetfabric.com to discuss your use case.

Yes, we provide a /31 for public connections.

At this time, you cannot use your own public ASN.

For an AWS public virtual interface, you can use your own public IPs. When you provision your connection, we send AWS an automated email to confirm that you are authorized to use our public ASN with your public IPs. All public virtual interfaces require up to 72 hours approval by AWS.

You can also use your own public IPs when configuring Microsoft public peering.

You cannot use your own IPs for Google or IBM.

This depends on the cloud service provider.

For router peer IPs:

• AWS allows you to input your own IP addresses or have them generated on your behalf.
• Microsoft Azure requires you to provide your own subnet ranges. The peer IPs are auto-allocated from this range.
• For Google Cloud and IBM Cloud, the IP addresses are generated on your behalf and cannot be edited.

When advertising VPC subnets, you can set your own prefixes (up to 1000 in and 1000 out).

Not at this time.

No, Cloud Routers only support EVPL virtual circuits.

Provisioning can take up to 10 minutes, depending on the cloud.

Additional configuration takes a few more minutes depending on how many prefixes you need to add.

At this time, we have not set a limit on connections.

Yes.

No, all traffic stays within PacketFabric’s software-defined network.

Our network architects have carefully engineered our software-defined network to take the best routes between on-net locations. This applies to both primary paths and fallback paths.

Rather than creating one centralized router to handle inter-cloud, we create routing instances at each location you provision a connection.

This allows us to avoid hair-pinning traffic and provides far more scalability.

Yes. However, review the requirements for the Cloud Router ASN before creating the Cloud Router: BGP Reference

For example, you can have both private and public AWS VIFs on a Cloud Router, but if you create the Cloud Router with a private ASN, then AS prepending does not work for public VIF connections. See AWS docs - Prerequisites for virtual interfaces.

It’s likely that we support a much broader range of VPN hardware and software than those that have been verified, as long as the device follows IPsec standards. If you have any questions about support for your device, we will be happy to help you test it. Contact sales@packetfabric.com to speak with one of our solutions experts.

Cloud Router public connections support NAT within the same Cloud Router, so you can achieve NAT from private space behind IPsec to a public cloud.

Note: We don’t support NAT on the IPsec connection itself on our side but the customer side can be behind a NAT gateway.