Moving to IPv6 – herein lies madness (Part 1)

Moving to IPv6 – herein lies madness (Part 1)

Well, it’s finally happened. It’s the “year of IPv6” for the enterprise.
With this transition will come a significant amount of “cognitive load” for enterprise application and infrastructure administrators.

After a decade or more, it appears there will finally be a broad-based move to Internet Protocol version 6. All it took was for Amazon to announce a price increase for the use of IPv4 (Internet Protocol version 4) addresses.

IPv6 has been being deployed incrementally since 2012 – but for many of us it has been via background adoption by consumer products that we may not even been aware of; cable companies and mobile phone vendors providing the infrastructure to our homes and devices.

For the b2b software and infrastructure technology used by the enterprise, it remains new and novel. For example, Amazon Cloud has supported some IPv6 for a number of years, both dual stack and single stack, whilst Microsoft Azure Cloud only began in earnest in 2023. Both platforms still have significant limitations and fragmentation of support across products.

So if the tech titans are just getting their heads around IPv6, what are us “normies” supposed to do?

At Cohesive Networks, our plan was to start slipping in support over the course of this year, finishing sometime in 2025 for an expected enterprise demand in 2026. Why haven’t we supported to date? Frankly, “no one uses it” – in that of the SaaS, PaaS, and BPaaS companies we support, none of them have asked for it……until the AWS price increase. Our metal-based competitors like Cisco and Palo Alto have supported it for years, but from our broad experience working with our customers, and our customer’s customers, and our customer’s customer’s outsourced network support people, the feature was a tree falling in the forest.

While there is a need to expand the available address pool, there is conflict and confusion between the “producer-centric” intelligence that created IPv6 and its revisions and implementations to date, and the practical needs, the “consumer-centric” needs, of the people just trying to get their jobs done.

There is a disconnect between the simple needs that we satisfy with IPv4; deploy a server, deploy 10 servers, deploy a cluster of a couple hundred servers; and the massive scale of IPv6 which immediately confronts its business consumers.

At Cohesive, we have done a decent job of reducing much of networking and security to “addresses, routes, and rules.” But even for us, helping customers deal with three hundred forty undecillion, two hundred eighty-two decillion, three hundred sixty-six nonillion, nine hundred twenty octillion, nine hundred thirty-seven septillion addresses is a challenge.

Ok, that number above is the whole space, so maybe I am being overly dramatic.

Let’s just get an AWS VPC or Azure VNET with a single IPv6 subnet; that should be easier to deal with.
Minimal size is a /64, that sounds better. Oops, that is 18,446,744,073,709,500,000 addresses! (For those of you speaking it aloud, that’s eighteen quintillion, four hundred forty-six quadrillion, seven hundred forty-four trillion, seventy-three billion, seven hundred nine million, five hundred thousand addresses).

And for every virtual network/subnet – another eighteen quintillion.

Now, if I have 10, 100 or 1000 servers to deploy – what does it matter? Just use some addresses and carry on.
True enough, but the fact that they come from a potential space of 1.8 x 10^19 is serious cognitive load that is presented to the infrastructure operators, and it is naive to think this doesn’t come at a cost. As computer memory went from 512k on a “FAT MAC” to 96G on my MacbookPro, I didn’t have to confront the gap between 524,288 bytes and 103,079,215,104 bytes in the normal course of my work.

So what do we do? Well for our part, as we release VNS3 6.6 (with IPv6), we are reducing some of this cognitive load and will be working with our customers to ever-simplify the move to IPv6.

In the meantime, here is a Google Spreadsheet we created for our internal use to help us get our heads around the magnitude of the IPv6 space. Feel free to share: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1pIth3KJH1RbQFJvZmZmpBGq6rMMBhqEmfK-ouSNszNY/edit#gid=0

Stand Apart – but be Cohesive

I received a number of congratulations on the LinkedIn platform last month when apparently it let people know I have been with Cohesive Networks for 9 years.

As I reflected on this one thing stands out in relief, and that is Cohesive has always “stood apart” within the markets it serves.

Cohesive Networks exists at the confluence of virtualization, cloud, networking and security. We are of course a part of this commercial market but have not been re-directed by every twist and turn of these markets that have come and gone. Flavor and fashion are often the order of the day, and no doubt we have adopted some of the descriptive labels through time. But the labels have not swayed us from our essential mission, getting customers to, through and across the clouds safely.

If you look at the Gartner hype cycle for cloud networking it provides a gallery of differentiators through time: network observability, container/kubernetes networking, multicloud networking, SASE, SSE, Network-as-a-Service, SD-branch, network automation, network function virtualization, software defined networking, zero trust networks, software-defined WAN, micro-segmentation. If you look at these different facets, the tools, techniques, and knowledge to implement these are not that different. What is different is the packaging and the go-to-market.

Because we have been providing a virtual network platform since the clouds began, we have had customers use us for all of these functions. As a result the good news is we have been less “swayed” by flavor and fashion, which has done well for our existing customer. The bad news is we haven’t always best communicated our value to the potential new customer who may be thinking very much in the context of one of these re-packaged approaches.

Our usual inbound leads are “Hi, I think we need your stuff” or “Hi, we are using a lot of your stuff, can we discuss volume discounts and support plans”.

This communication posture stems from the fact that we have often been ahead of our competitors in either implementation or insight, or both. We were the first virtual network appliance in the EC2 cloud, IBM Cloud, many of the “clouds no-more”, and at later dates among the first network and security appliances in Azure and Google.

Cohesive’s patents are for “user controlled networking in 3rd party computing environments”. It is a subtle distinction – but powerful, between what an infrasturcture administrator, network administrator or hypervisor administrator could do at that time, and the freedom of our users on that infrastructure to create any network they wanted. These are encrypted, virtual networks that their infrastructure providers know nothing about, can not see, nor control. Our users in 2009 and beyond could create any secure, mesh, over-the-top network they wanted without the need or expense of the network incumbents who came before us. These customers find us significantly easier, significantly less expensive and made for the cloud without “metal” roots dragging them back to the ground.

When we showed this capability to investors, partners, infra providers, acquirerers – many of them said “I don’t get it” or “we’ll do better (someday)” or “you have to do all this in hardware” and more. By comparison, the customers who found us through web search, cloud conferences, and cloud marketplaces said “that’s what I need” and a subscription cloud networking company was born.

Looking back, it is shocking that our first offering was “virtual subnets”. It is amazing to think about it, but we sold subnets! At that time any cloud you used put your virtual instances in a very poorly segmented 10.0.0.0/8 subnet of the compute virtualization environment. People wanted to control addresses, routes, and rules, and our encrypted mesh overlay provided it. That was our first product-market fit, and of course that has evolved considerably.

This set us on the path of listening to our customers, and asking ourselves quite fundamentally what a network is, and what is it used for, and by whom?

So while we stood apart, of course we were Cohesive.

Networks are all about standards and interoperability, we just did it our own way.

The feedback from customers was “yes” and “more please”. The feedback from the experts often remained “huh”. So we pressed forward in our own autonomic and somewhat autistic manner, only listening to certain market signals and obsessively working to fulfill a vision of networking and security that says “networks are addresses, routes and rules, everything else is implementation detail the customers should rarely see.”

Now in 2024 and beyond, as the chaotic streams of the changing cloud markets, Internet Protocol v6, and the needs for secure AI and private AI collide, my guess is we will still stand apart while still being Cohesive.

Enterprise WireGuard® with Cohesive VPN Client

Enterprise WireGuard® with Cohesive VPN Client

Cohesive Networks VNS3 6.0 - Clientpacks Page

VNS3 6.0 Beta3 will be available in cloud marketplaces or upon request this week (contactme@www.cohesive.net).  In our last post we showed how easy it is to connect your native WireGuard® clients to VNS3 6.0.  In this post we show you how to use the Cohesive VPN Client to achieve the same goals like connecting to data centers or cloud VPCs/VNETs, and managing your own WireGuard® network connecting multiple people and devices.  In addition, we will show an overview of using our enterprise capabilities like dynamic route updates, easy tunneling of all traffic with local subnet exceptions, and OIDC integration so you can authenticate your vpn users with Google Authentication, Okta, Auth0 and more.

The screen shots throughout show three windows; upper left the Cohesive VPN client, bottom left a command line from the same Mac, and to the right the cloud-based VNS3 server.

VNS3 Network Platform has the concept of “clientpacks” – basically the credentials needed to connect a machine or a person to the network via a VPN client.  Historically “clientpacks” have been “openvpn” by default.  Starting in 6.0 clientpacks are WireGuard by default. In a future release we will support a dual stack with both “ovpn” and “wg” connections simultaneously, and a goal of IPsec clients as well.

In the picture above and those below we show the “Clientpacks” page. From this you can perform key administrative functions like disabling addresses, re-generating credentials, updating pre-shared keys, and getting access URLs for secure and easy distribution of VPN credentials.

 

Access URL

Cohesive Networks VNS3 6.0 - Clientpack Download
Cohesive Networks VNS3 6.0 - Clientpack Access URL

Above shows the results of choosing “Access URL” and displaying its result. This is a secure, one-time, timed URL allowing users to copy/paste the clientpack, download it for import, or use via a QR code on mobile devices.

It has all the necessary information to make a connection using the Cohesive VPN Client – with or without PSKs.

The commented lines are used by CNVPN CLI and GUI for additional enterprise support; failover, dynamic route updates, and OIDC authentication.

Copy/paste the clientpack into the Cohesive client via the “Paste” option, and choose Save.

 

Connect

Cohesive Networks VNS3 6.0 - Clientpack Paste into CNVPN
Cohesive Networks VNS3 6.0 - CNVPN Connect

Next choose “Connect” from the Cohesive Client’s “Actions” menu –  and the VPN connection is created.  The VNS3 Clientpacks page then shows the status as “connected”.

Below shows access to the VPN network by successfully pinging the VNS3 controller’s VPN address.  (By default, this connection can access other addresses on the VPN. If that’s not desired it is easily changed via the Firewall page.)  

Cohesive Networks VNS3 6.0 - CNVPN Connect
Cohesive Networks VNS3 6.0 - CNVPN Ping

You can use the Action menu on the VNS3 Clientpacks page to perform administrative operations.   For example, if you select “Disable” on the connection, the client is dropped from the VPN.  

Similar operations can be performed to re-new or re-secure a connection by adding a PSK or re-generating keys (both of which require the clientpack to be redistributed to the user or device).  As expected, when you enable a PSK for the connection, the user is unable to access the network.  With the credential re-deployed with the appropriate clientpack containing the PSK, they are back on the net!

To see some of those operations in action, take a look at our previous post.  Cohesive’s target is to provide organizations the ability to deploy their own enterprise VPN infrastructure.  This could be managed by Cohesive via our SecurePass offering, or self-managed.  Regardless, our initial focus for 6.0 is managed, enterprise WireGuard.

Dynamic Route Updates

One of our key enterprise features is dynamic route updates.  For “people vpns” you can usually just tunnel all traffic through the VPN – making the VPN adapter the default gateway.  However, for IoT and machine2machine vpns, dynamic routing is a critical capability.  You allow the device to have its own local gateway but when routes arrive dynamically, the traffic begins to follow that path.  If the route is removed from the network, the default gateway is used.

In the example below the configuration is changed to have “RoutePolling = True”, and on the VNS3 controller a route to 55.55.55.55 has been advertised through the VPN.  In the terminal window route display there is not yet a specific route to that public IP.

Once re-connected, the route to 55.55.55.55 through the VPN is visible on the client as a result of the dynamic route updating.

If that route is disabled or removed from the VPN network, then it is removed from the client.

Cohesive Networks VNS3 6.0 - CNVPN Route Polling
Cohesive Networks VNS3 6.0 - CNVPN Route Advertisement

Tunnel All Traffic

Tunneling all traffic through the VPN to the Internet is a snap with the Cohesive VPN Client.

Set the client parameter “TunnelAllTraffic” to “True” AND make sure you have enabled firewall directives on the VNS3 Server to send all VPN traffic out to the Internet.

VNS3 Free edition comes with a default set of rules in a group called “VPN2Internet.  Go to the Groups view on the Firewall page and enable these rules.

This will direct all traffic from your VPN client to the Internet, getting its address translated to the Public IP of the VNS3 controller.

What if you still want to be able to access local network resources like a printer or file server?  In that case, use the “LocalRoutes” option to enter a comma delimited list of the network CIDRs you want to exempt from the VPN so they can be reached locally.

Now that all traffic is being tunneled, from the command line the public IP 8.8.8.8 can be successfully pinged.  To “prove” this traffic is going into the VPN we show it via our Network Sniffer.

Cohesive Networks VNS3 6.0 - Firewall VPN2Internet
Cohesive Networks VNS3 6.0 - VPN2Internet Success

VPN User Authentication

So far the examples have just used WireGuard protocol with unique keys and pre-shared key (PSK) for the connections.  What about more specific user authentication?  For WireGuard in VNS3 6.0 we use OIDC (Open ID Connect), and will add LDAP support in future.  (Our dual stack offering in future will allow simultaneous use of OpenVPN and WireGuard clients, with your choice of LDAP/AD or OIDC).

With OIDC support you create a VPN users and/or admins application in your OIDC provider and then configure VNS3 integration.

Cohesive Networks VNS3 6.0 - OIDC VPN Users

Once the OIDC configuration has been saved you can login. In this case we are using our Google Apps login.  When “Connect” is chosen, a login screen pops up in the default browser.

Cohesive Networks VNS3 6.0 - VPN Users Google Identity

Upon entering the correct password the login panel indicates success and the VPN client connects!

Cohesive Networks VNS3 6.0 - VPN Users OIDC Success

Next up we will show using the Cohesive CNVPN CLI on a Linux machine.  For cloud overlay networks and over-the-top cloud networking, the CLI is a powerful way to bring your enterprise feature set to your cloud and multi-cloud deployments. 

(“WireGuard” and the “WireGuard” logo are registered trademarks of Jason A. Donenfeld.)

Native WireGuard® Clients and VNS3 6.0 Beta2

Native WireGuard® Clients and VNS3 6.0 Beta2

VNS3 6.0 Beta2 is now available.

You can find the Free edition in both the Amazon and Azure marketplaces (GCP coming soon).

It is an easy way to get a server up and running that can connect you to data centers, cloud VPCs/VNETs, has a super firewall, straightforward support of even difficult things like “source based routing”, and most of all a quick way to run and manage your own WireGuard® network connecting multiple people, devices, or both.

This post will show you how to use the standard Mac Appstore WireGuard client built and delivered by the WireGuard team with Cohesive Networks VNS3 6.0 network controllers. (Of course similar capability is available using the same app from the Windows/iPhone/Android “app stores” as well.)

In future posts we will show the Cohesive CLI (cnvpn) at work, and the Cohesive WG GUI working with VNS3 6.0. And then we will follow up by showing how the different connection options work with a distributed VPN cluster where you can spread a VNS3 controller mesh across regions and clouds with ease, yet have a unified VPN system for management of credentials, pre-shared keys, OIDC sessions and more.

In the screen shots throughout we have three windows; upper left the Mac OS WG client, bottom left a command line from the same Mac, and to the right the cloud-based VNS3 server supporting a wide range of cloud networking use-cases, and here specifically WireGuard VPN connections.

VNS3 Network Platform has the concept of “clientpacks” – basically the credentials needed to connect a machine or a person via a VPN client to the network.  Historically they have been “openvpn” by default – and starting in 6.0 they are WireGuard by default. In a future release we will support a dual stack with both “ovpn” and “wg” connections simultaneously, and a goal of IPsec clients as well.

In the picture above and those below we see the “Clientpacks” page. From here you can perform key administrative functions like disabling addresses, re-generating credentials, updating pre-shared keys, and getting access URLs for secure and easy distribution of VPN credentials.

Above shows the results of choosing “Access URL” and displaying its result. This is a secure, one-time, timed URL which allows users to copy/paste the clientpack, download it for import, or for mobile clients use a QR code for import.

It has all the necessary information to make a connection using the standard WG Client – with or without PSKs.

There is also a series of commented lines which are used by CNVPN CLI and GUI for additional enterprise support (failover, dynamic route updates, OIDC authentication) to be discussed in future. For now we just want to focus on how easy it is to connect native WG clients.

Copy/paste the clientpack into the Mac OS client, and click SAVE/ACTIVATE.

Voilà – you are connected to the VPN.  The VNS3 Clientpacks page shows the status as “connected”.

The WG Client now shows its statistics about the connection, and below we are pinging the VNS3 controller’s VPN address to show access to the VPN network.

(By default, this connection can access other addresses on the VPN. If that’s not desired it is easily changed via the Firewall page.)  

If needed you can use the Action menu to perform administrative operations.   For example, if you select “Disable” on the connection, the client is dropped from the VPN.  Below, we see the client set to disabled state by the Admin, and we see the “pings” begin to fail.

Then we “Enable” – and the client is back on the network and packets begin to flow.

And of course similar operations can be performed to re-new or re-secure a connection by adding a PSK or re-generating keys – both of which require the clientpack to be redistributed to the user or device.  But as expected, when you enable a PSK for the connection, the user is unable to access the network.  With the credential re-deployed with the appropriate clientpack containing the PSK, they are back on the net!

Accessing the other devices on the VPN network is one use, what about getting to the Internet?

This requires a couple configuration elements on the client side which requires a little bit of operating system knowledge on the client side and a of couple firewall rules on the VNS3 Controller.  We won’t go into those specifics here.

But, if you look at the Cohesive-specific directives used by the CNVPN CLI and GUI – one of them is “TunnelAllTraffic” – and when this is set to “true” – all the client side magic is done for you!  But that is for another day.

(“WireGuard” and the “WireGuard” logo are registered trademarks of Jason A. Donenfeld.)

 

Distributed Hybrid MultiCloud Mesh with VNS3 and LNKe

Distributed Hybrid MultiCloud Mesh with VNS3 and LNKe

As cloud adoption continues to ramp up in 2022, with Gartner projecting another 21.7% growth in cloud spend this year, companies are maturing beyond their initial workload migrations to single cloud vendors. Whether to create resiliency due to the now not so uncommon major outages we have seen in the past few years, to tailor their many application environments to changing business requirements, or to migrate to new cloud vendors whose offering is the best fit. However, in order to realize these opportunities, companies need a consistent network layer that is uncoupled from any one cloud vendors specific dependancies. No matter which cloud you choose, achieving this goal requires utilizing third party network solutions. Such a solution should ideally facilitate connectivity to data-centers, remote users, and IOT devices as well.

Cohesive Networks VNS3 cloud edge security controllers can create the backbone across all of your public cloud vendors in an easy to manage and secure mesh, with LNKe connecting all of your virtual private networks. This gives you a fully transitive network across all of your cloud real estate, running at performative speeds with built in failover and self healing mesh capabilities. Granular IPSec cloud edge configurations allow you to connect corporate data centers, partner networks and vendor access, regardless of their hardware. Policy enforcement is consistent across the network and has been simplified for ease of management. With our comprehensive firewall you can easily define people, groups and network objects to allow your remote workforce to securely connect at the edge closest to their physical location. In short, with VNS3 and LNKe, you can create a full network mesh consistent with your needs that can grow to anywhere that you need to be and scale with your deploments.

Please reach out to the Cohesive Networks sales and solutions team at contactme@www.cohesive.net to further the discussion with any interests that you may have. We are always happy to help.

NATe: A Tax-Free Alternative to Cloud NAT Gateways

NATe: A Tax-Free Alternative to Cloud NAT Gateways

Whether you need to connect multiple cloud instances, communicate with the public internet from private resources, or directly connect to instances in local data centers, chances are you will be using Network Address Translation (NAT) to make that connection. All major cloud providers provide some product or service to provide NAT functionality, and some platforms even provide separate public and private variants. Because cloud instances running in private subnets are unable to access resources like time servers, webpages, or OS repositories without NAT functionality, most users find themselves relying on their cloud platform’s NAT offerings. By simply following their cloud providers’ recommended best practices, users are overpaying for an overcomplicated and inflexible service that a home cable modem does for free.  So why pay so much for such a simple network function?

If You’re Using Cloud Platform NAT Gateway(s), You’re Overspending on Cloud Deployments.

Overspending of any kind in the wake of the economic disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic can be deadly for any business. Yes, some have fared better than others during this challenging time but all organizations have revisited projections and budgets in the face of uncertainty. According to Gartner, the pressure is on for budget holders to optimize costs.

Pre COVID-19
54%
of enterprises planned IT budget increases
Post COVID-19
84%
of enterprises expect IT budget decreases

Where to Start?

Look to the sky! Your cloud bill is likely full of opportunities for savings, especially if your application relies on NAT functionality. Using AWS NAT Gateway pricing as an example, let’s start with the comparative base subscription costs:

  AWS NAT Gateway VNS3 NATe
Subscription $0.045 / hour $0.01 / hour*
Data Processing (TAX) $0.045 / GB $0.00 / GB
* Price includes runtime fees (on-demand t3.nano $.0052 / hr) + NATe subscription ($0.005 / hr)

As you can see from this example, the standalone subscription cost of an AWS NAT gateway is more than the cost of a single t3.medium instance. The already low VNS3 NATe subscription cost will provide you even more savings when you consider the fact that you don’t have to create as many individual NAT gateways, each of which would be  accompanied by an additional AWS NAT Gateway subscription. The cost differential here makes NATe an obvious choice at any deployment scale and we even offer a free NATe license for smaller deployments.

VNS3 NATe is also incredibly scalable because we don’t increase our data processing rates as your bandwidth needs scale.  Below is a pricing table that shows the total cost of running a single NAT Gateway vs a VNS3 NATe instance as the traffic throughput increases in a given month:

GB / Month AWS NAT Gateway VNS3 NATe
1 $32.45 $7.20
10 $32.85 $7.20
100 $36.90 $7.20
1,000 $77.40 $7.20
5,000 $257.40 $7.20
10,000 $482.40 $7.20
50,000 $2,282.40 $7.20
100,000 $4,532.40 $7.20

We also have customers who maintain 100s or 1000s of VPCs with NAT requirements of 1-100 GB per month.  Those enterprise cloud customer at scale have typically seen costs drop to 1/5 of what they would pay for AWS NAT Gateways.  To illustrate this savings, take the example from one of our customers has 1800 VPCs each with a NAT Gateway.  The total data processed through these NAT Gateways is low and averages 10GB / month with much more potential savings for deployments that pass more traffic out the NAT device.

AWS NAT Gateway VNS3 NATe
Monthly Runtime $58,320 Monthly Runtime $12,960
Data Processing (TAX) $810 Data Processing (TAX) $0
TOTAL PER MONTH $59,130 TOTAL PER MONTH $12,960
* Price includes runtime fees (on-demand t3.nano $0.0052 / hr) + NATe subscription ($0.005 / hr)

Total NATe saving per month in this case is $46K and $554K per annum.

Of course, costs savings are not limited to just NAT Gateway spend.  Other opportunities for savings include right sizing instances (latest generation instance families are always less expensive), decommissioning unused services/resources (I’m looking at you load balancers), and reviewing storage strategies (such as EBS).

What is a NAT Gateway?

A NAT Gateway is a network service that performs a simple network function: Network Address Translation for cloud-based servers running in a private network (private VPC subnet). Here is the AWS documentation detailing the NAT Gateway functionality. NAT Gateways perform a specific type of NAT called IP Masquerading, where devices in a private IP network use a single public IP associated with the gateway for communication with the public Internet.

This is the same function that your home modem performs for free. You’re likely leveraging this NAT functionality as you read this post. Basically the NAT functionality on a NAT Gateway or your home modem allow devices on a private network (computers, phones, TVs, refrigerators, toothbrushes, etc. in the case of your home network) to access the Internet and receive responses but not allow devices on the public Internet to initiate connection into your private network. All traffic sent from the private network to the public Internet uses the modem’s public IP address.

NATe to the Rescue!

In response to direct requests by our customers, we created a low-cost, instance-based alternative to NAT Gateways – VNS3 NATe.

Available on AWS PM and Azure MP today:

* No subscription premium but total throughput limited to 50mbps

What is a NATe?

NATe instances are drop-in replacements from Cohesive Networks for NAT Gateways. Simply launch in a VPC/VNET subnet with an Internet Gateway associated, Stop Src/Dst checking (enable IP forwarding), and update the Route Tables associated with the private Subnets to point 0.0.0.0/0 destinations at the NATe instance-id.

Cohesive-Networks_NATe-Network-Diagram_20210318

NATe provides all the functionality of a NAT Gateway plus enterprise grade security and controls at a fraction of the cost. Some of the functional highlights of NATe include:

  • High Performance – run on the smallest instance sizes to maximize value or larger instance for greater total throughput
  • Secure – access to a firewall to allow additional and orthogonal policy enforcement for traffic flows
  • Control – access logs, network tools like tcpdump, status information
  • Customize – leverage the Cohesive Networks Plugin system to add L4-L7 network services to the NATe instance like NIDs, WAF, Proxy, LB, etc.
  • Automate – fully automate the deployment of VNS3 NATe instances as part of your existing deployment framework leveraging the RESTful API to reduce implementation costs.
  • Failover – NATe can be configured in a number of HA architectures to provide the same level of insurance needed for critical infrastructure via instance auto recovery, auto scale groups, and Cohesive Networks’ own Peering and HA Container functionality
  • Upgrade – NATe is fully upgradeable to fully licensed VNS3 controllers deployed as a single application security controller or part of secure network edge mesh

Still Not Convinced?

Cohesive’s NATe offers a dramatically more cost-efficient solution to often critical NAT requirements in cloud deployments of all shapes and sizes. NATe is more flexible, more scalable, and easier to manage than first-party cloud NAT gateways that are charging you a premium for the functionality of a standard consumer modem. If you don’t believe us, we launched a free version of our NATe offering in both the AWS and Azure marketplaces so you can launch and configure them and see for yourself!

Have questions about set-up or pricing? Please to contact us.