Anapaya EDGE on Microsoft Azure

This section will guide you through the steps to get the Anapaya EDGE Appliance from the Azure Compute Gallery up and running.

Prerequisites

Before you can start, you need to have an Azure account. If you do not have one yet, you can create one here. You also need to have a SCION access into the Azure cloud. If you do not have one yet, please contact the Anapaya Customer Success team.

Installation

The Anapaya EDGE Appliance is available on the Azure Marketplace.

Start an Anapaya EDGE VM using one of the recommended instance types. We recommend allocating at least two CPUs and 4GB of memory or four CPUs and 8GB of memory for better throughput. You can always change the instance type later on if you want to increase performance. Use anapaya as the username for the Administrator account and set a secure password (do not use SSH public key based authentication at this point).

VNET Configuration

We recommend to launch the appliance in a VNET with at least two subnets. One subnet is used for the management interface and can have Internet access. The other subnet is used for the SCION interface towards the SCION network; the IP addressing details of this subnet are provided by your SCION access provider. Ideally, you should also have a third subnet to connect the EDGE appliance to your applications.

Security Group Configuration

If you want to access the appliance from the Internet via SSH, you need to configure the security group to allow incoming SSH connections. The appliance uses port 22 for SSH.

Connecting to the Appliance

Once the appliance is launched, you can connect to it via SSH or use the Azure Serial console. Use the credentials that you configured on instance creation. As part of the appliance configuration, you can configure the appliance to use your SSH keys for login. See SSH Configuration for more details.

Configuration

After connecting to the appliance, you can configure it using the appliance-cli. Refer to the Initial Configuration section in the general getting started guide for more details

Note

The appliance is configured to use DHCP on initial launch. When you start changing the appliance configuration, you should first configure the interfaces section with the DHCP values for the management interface that were assigned by Azure. Otherwise, you might lose connectivity to the appliance.

NAT Configuration

In some scenarios you might need to configure NAT on the appliance. Refer to the Network Address Translation (NAT) section in the general configuration guide for more details.

Redundancy

To achieve redundancy, you can deploy two appliances in different availability zones and configure them as a cluster. Refer to the Cluster section in the general configuration guide for more details. For a redundant deployment in Azure, we recommend using the BGP integration of the Anapaya EDGE which can be configured together with the Azure Route Server.

The diagrams below show different examples of how you can deploy the Anapaya EDGE appliance in the Azure cloud within and across regions. In all cases, the EDGE appliances are run as part of a Virtual Machine Scale Set, but you can also run them as individual VMs in different availability zones. The EDGE appliances are connected to the SCION network via the Express Route provided by the SCION Access Provider (ISP). Inside the Azure VNET (Transit VNET), the appliances are connected to the Azure Route Server to exchange routing information with the Azure network. We recommend using a separate VNET for the applications that use the SCION connectivity and connect it to the Transit VNET via a VNET peering.

Single ISP

Single ISP

A single SCION ISP can provide SCION connectivity to multiple EDGE appliances in an Azure VNET.

Dual ISP

If you require ISP redundancy for your applications, you can connect the EDGE appliances to two different SCION ISPs. One EDGE appliance can be connected to one or more ISPs, depending on the offerings of the SCION ISPs.

Dual ISP

Dual ISP in different regions

If you require ISP redundancy across regions, you can connect the EDGE appliances to two different SCION ISPs in different regions.

Dual ISP in different regions