Connecting multiple VCNs on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure with Azure using the OCI-Azure private interconnection

In June 2019, Oracle and Microsoft announced a cloud interoperability partnership where customers can run mission-critical enterprise workloads across Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) by directly connecting the nearby OCI and Azure regions through a privately owned network. This interconnection connects OCI FastConnect directly with Azure ExpressRoute without an intermediary network provider. It provides a dedicated, highly available, low latency, and high-bandwidth connection that enables customers to run their workloads spread across the two clouds.

Making your workloads run smoother

As a general practice, customers deploy their various infrastructure environments and applications across multiple virtual cloud networks (VCNs) for resource isolation and better manageability. It can easily become a nightmare from the manageability perspective, if all the VCNs connect to either the on-premises environment or Microsoft Azure. You couldn’t attach multiple VCNs to a single DRG. To overcome that limitation, customers used hub-and-spoke topology to establish connectivity between Microsoft Azure and multiple VCNs and subnets in OCI.

The following diagram shows the high-level architecture diagram, and the detailed setup is already available for deploying the private interconnection using the hub-and-spoke topology.

The recently announced feature under OCI Networking includes attaching multiple VCNs to a single dynamic routing gateway (DRG). Previously, to achieve a similar setup, deploying hub-and-spoke topology was the only possible solution. Using the new feature, you can attach a single DRG to multiple VCNs directly and connect multiple VCNs through a single private interconnection to Azure.

The following graphic shows the new architecture:

Conclusion

As you can see, the newer capability removes the need of a hub-and-spoke topology if multiple VCNs require connecting to Azure resources. You can use a single private interconnection to serve multiple VCNs on OCI, with deploying multiple interconnects each terminating at individual VCN.

For more information on the interconnection, see the following references:

• Oracle and Microsoft accelerate enterprise cloud adoption

• Introducing global connectivity and enhanced cloud networking with the dynamic routing gateway

• Learn about interconnecting Oracle Cloud with Microsoft Azure

• Set up a private interconnection between Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud regions

• Deploying Oracle Cloud and Microsoft Azure interconnection using Terraform