With the aid of Data Solutions Group (DSG), Megaport has put together an interesting demo of the way its Elastic Connectivity service can be controlled programmatically.
Megaport's Elastic Connectivity provides clients with on-demand interconnection to large-scale providers including Amazon Web Services, Azure and Google, or to other Megaport customers and partners. One logical connection can be dynamically partitioned into virtual connections to different providers, and the bandwidth can be scaled up or down as required, so there is no need to pay for (say) a full-time 100Mbps connection if that capacity is only used during office hours and the off-peak traffic is less than 1Mbps.
Connections can be leased from one day to one year, and varied between 1Mbps to 100Gbps.
Although Megaport offers smartphone apps that allow such reconfigurations, it turns out that "nobody" uses them, according to Megaport ecosystem director Ed Smith-Stubbs, and the web portal and the API is where the action is.
{loadposition stephen08}So Smith-Stubbs demonstrated the use of an Amazon Echo using the AWS Alexa voice service in conjunction with a custom-written "skill" (the term for a piece of code that converts recognised speech into actions) to control a Megaport connection.
A RDP session to hardware running in Megaport's Brisbane data centre was used to display the bandwidth currently available to it on a virtual cross-connect. Smith-Stubbs said "Alexa, ask Megaport to set virtual cross connect speed to 300" and within a minute - the time needed for changes to propagate across Megaport's network - the bandwidth visibly increased.
And when he said "Alexa, ask Megaport to set virtual cross connect speed to 100" it went back to the original setting.
DSG sales manager Nick Poole said the implementation used AWS Lambda serverless compute service to run the code that converts the output from the Alexa skill (in the example in the previous paragraph, that's "SetSpeed" and "100") into the required Megaport API calls.
"It's actually quite basic," he said, adding that it is simple enough that 2 million of these requests could be made without exceeding the limit on Lambda's free tier.
While the use of Alexa is probably not a real-world scenario, he conceded, DSG does use Lambda for its automation management platform to perform tasks such as shutting down Citrix farms running on AWS during off-peak periods and then starting them up again before people arrive at work, and for automating snapshot management to keep storage costs under control.