On October 18, 2019, SCSK held the "Yamaha Network Innovation Forum 2019" to explain Yamaha's network equipment product strategy and latest products. Yamaha's virtual router "vRX", which was finally announced this year, has attracted a lot of attention, and the ASCII presents questionnaire competition was also very lively.
Can Yamaha router skills be used in various clouds?
Yamaha Network Innovation Forum is an annual technical forum held by SCSK, Yamaha's exclusive distributor in Japan for network equipment. This year, the event will be held in six locations nationwide: Sapporo, Sendai, Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka, and Fukuoka. A variety of sessions were held, including presentation of strategies, commentary on certification tests by the Japan Network Engineers Association, vRX and application control (DPI) by columnists, and demonstration test reports on wireless LAN access points.
This year's theme is Yamaha's first virtual router "vRX". For Yamaha, which has been developing hardware routers for over 20 years, providing a virtual router that runs on the public cloud is a big decision. The ability to use Yamaha routers, which have mainly been used for inter-base connections, for cloud connections will open up new markets and present challenges for existing users and sales partners. A session with an engineer who was already proficient in the cloud gave me clues as to how to approach a new genre and how to create a business.
Pipeline CEO Yasutaka Hamada, who gave a lecture titled ``Construction of a high-mobility service development and operation environment that can be realized with the virtual router ``vRX'', emphasized the point of vRX as ``Flexible network design on the cloud. "Able to build complex networks easily", "Direct VPN connection is possible with smartphones and tablets", "Inheritance of Yamaha router setting know-how" and "Unified management by AWS management console".
Pipeline Representative Director Yasutaka Hamada
Mr. Hamada has high expectations for vRX as a cloud engineer. For example, vRX can use existing Yamaha skills as they are, so multiple clouds can be used with common skills. "Currently, we only support AWS, but by supporting other cloud services in the future, engineers will be able to improve the portability of their skills," said Mr. Hamada. In addition, since it supports IPsec aggressive mode, VPN connection is possible without a fixed IP address. It is easy to use even for remote access where the IP address changes each time you connect without going to the office. "You can access the cloud from cable TV and mobile lines, which you gave up until now," said Mr. Hamada. Furthermore, regarding DPI, which realizes traffic control for each application, it is also possible to "miss" Windows Update and Office 365 traffic.
Of course, vRX runs on the public cloud, so you can enjoy the benefits of the cloud. It is also possible to scale the router according to the traffic, and it is easier to create a redundant configuration than on-premises. For example, by using the vRX cloud design pattern, various configurations can be easily realized, from simple routing between public and private subnets within a VPC to highly available designs with vRXs in multiple AZs.
Leveraging the VRX design pattern
"It feels good to be able to do my own design, but I would like to stand on the shoulders of a giant called cloud design pattern and reduce the number of man-hours for service development while expressing my own identity" (Mr. Hamada). Another great advantage is that you can touch vRX from the management console. Mr. Hamada points out, "It will be possible to entrust the application developer with starting and stopping, etc., and to set the AWS IAM Roll appropriately to eliminate the boundary between Dev and Ops."
Mr. Hamada explained points to note about using vRX, such as connecting with SSH and using commands, and appealed that the user guide and command reference are substantial, so please feel at ease. "When designing a network, I want you to be aware of who, what, and how. People who are still afraid of the cloud have vague fears.・I would like you to explain that authorization and route control are possible.” (Mr. Hamada).
Before I knew it, there was only a Yamaha router in the server room
After the lecture by AWS Japan, Mr. Tsutomu Kojima of Yamaha, Mr. Ryuta Otaki, a cloud engineer, and Ibiza Otani from the ASCII editorial department ``ASCII presents vRX charm and expectations, let's talk about it'' was held. Using a tool called "Mentimeter", the idea is to reflect the content of votes from smartphones on the display on the stage in real time, and the three people on the stage will comment.
Mr. Kojima, the representative of Yamaha, is a veteran who has been involved in Yamaha routers for nearly 20 years. He is currently in charge of product and business planning, and is deeply involved in product planning for vRX. Internally, there was a plan to develop a Yamaha router with its own OS on a general-purpose OS, and the timing of the cloud shift overlapped with the birth of vRX. “A few years ago, when I returned to Japan from China, the server had moved to the cloud, so there was only a Yamaha physical router left in the server room. Mr.) So, it is said that product planning has started.
Mr. Tsutomu Kojima, Yamaha Communications Business Division
Ryuta Otaki, who made a guest appearance, is in charge of technical support for projects as an engineer at SORACOM, which handles IoT platforms, and also serves as a guest blogger for his previous job, the class method blog media "Developers.IO". He has extensive experience in using virtual routers such as Yamaha routers and Vyatta, and is familiar with AWS.
When asked about the router that a cloud engineer wants, Mr. Otaki said, ``The server has moved from the box to the cloud, has been abstracted, and can be used on demand. I want to ask routers to do the same.” In response to this, Mr. Kojima also responded, "With this vRX, you can change the performance later by adding a license or changing the instance. I think you can feel the scalability in many ways."
Developers.IO guest blogger Ryuta Otaki
In this session, three speakers talk about vRX, and the purpose of this session is to interactively talk about specific themes with participants in the venue using a questionnaire that can be used on smartphones. The first subject is the current CLI-based operation system. I asked if they needed a GUI or if they wanted to use the management console. Initially, CLI was overwhelming, but GUI increased in real time, and it turned out that there was a high need.
Otaki said, "There are two kinds of GUIs. There are two types of GUIs. There is a GUI for beginners who want to use the GUI because it is difficult to use a black screen CLI, and a visualization GUI that can visualize multiple pieces of information on a single screen. There is," commented. Mr. Kojima also said, "DPI, which was released at the same time, can only be seen with a GUI. In that sense, the value of visualization in the field of networking is increasing. I would like you to bring it back to development." says.
