Hedgehog VPC Virtual Private Cloud improvements for multi-tenancy and SONiC upgrade

Hedgehog Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) delivers multi-tenancy for hybrid and distributed cloud like AWS VPC delivers multi-tenancy for public cloud.

We announced our Just Cause release on December 23.  Our general goal is to release new Hedgehog versions every month.  We dropped our next release on January 23.  You can download Hedgehog for free.  Please see our A3 “Kirby” release notes for details.  Here’s a summary of the goodies.  

Hedgehog VPC delivers multi-tenancy for hybrid and distributed cloud like AWS VPC delivers multi-tenancy for public cloud.

Improved VPC Multi-Tenancy

Speaking of Hedgehog VPC, we improved multi-tenancy with support for multiple overlapping IPv4 addresses in a Hedgehog cloud network.  If you are a cloud service provider, your tenants can run Hedgehog VPCs with private address namespaces unique to them.  Nobody needs to worry that they overlap with another tenant’s namespaces.  If you are a tenant with multiple VPCs for dev, test, and prod, you can design test these VPCs with the same namespace configuration for consistency and test assurance.

IPAM IP Address Management Services integrated with Hedgehog VPC

Speaking of IP address management, we have that covered as well.  If you need IP address management, Hedgehog includes an on-demand DHCP service in Open Network Fabric.  This is one more step in delivering a turn-key cloud network appliance.  

While we aim to deliver a turn-key cloud network appliance, we also aim to deliver an open system.  Many people already run their own DHCP servers.  We have designed Open Network Fabric so you have the choice of integrating Hedgehog with DHCP relay configuration through our API.  Choice is nice.  Open design makes it happen.  Choose an open partner like Hedgehog. 

NTP Network Time Protocol Server integrated with Hedgehog Control Plane

NTP has been a key element of TCP/IP since the beginning of internet time.  Keeping all the resources in your cloud environment synchronized at the same time is super important for a whole bunch of reasons.  Again to deliver a turnkey cloud network, Hedgehog includes NTP servers in our control plane.  When Hedgehog boots, your switches will automatically use the NTP server on the Hedgehog control node.  Hedgehog controllers in turn can be configured to synchronize with external NTP servers.  

External Connections

To integrate Hedgehog Open Network Fabric with your DHCP, DNS or NTP server, just use the External object in our API.

Enterprise SONiC 4.2.0 by Broadcom

Hedgehog Open Network Fabric now includes Enterprise SONiC 4.2.0 by Broadcom.  This is an upgrade from Enterprise SONiC 4.1.1 by Broadcom included in our prior releases.  Hedgehog Design Partner Łukasz Łukowski has a nice blog post summarizing the new SONiC features in 4.2.0.  Łukasz’s post may be an interesting read if you are a SONiC enthusiast, but you really don’t need to worry about SONiC feature details if you are running Hedgehog Open Network Fabric.  We automate the whole process of running a distributed cloud network so your cloud operations team can use Hedgehog Virtual Private Cloud the same way they use AWS VPC.