Classic Central Cloud Architecture

Overview

Classic Central cluster is hosted on public cloud platforms offered by industry majors Amazon (AWS) and Microsoft Azure (in select regions). A ‘cluster’ is made of a set of compute and storage resources that support all the features and functions of Classic Central for connecting networking devices and users. Customers can choose between AWS or Azure to deploy Classic Central. These data centers are SSAE 18 SOC 2, PCI, FedRAMP and ISO 27001:2022 certified.

HPE Aruba Networking operates several of these clusters in the public cloud. Each cluster in AWS* is contained in its own Virtual Private Cluster (VPC). The VPC instance hosts all the Classic Central applications required for configuration, monitoring, reporting, and troubleshooting, in addition to control plane applications for Access Points and Gateways. The VPC instance also hosts the infrastructure components supporting applications like databases and messaging systems. Each Classic Central cluster is designed with built-in resiliency mechanism, which will be further explained in terms of applications, data storage, and supporting infrastructure.

The following figure depicts the architecture of a Classic Central cluster deployed in AWS.

Figure 1  Classic Central Cluster in AWS

Cloud-native technologies are used for applications, databases, and infrastructure components. Applications are orchestrated by Kubernetes, an open-source platform that helps manage, scale, and deploy containerized applications. It has become the standard for running large and complex applications. Databases are used for configuration, device state, clients state, stats, and search support. Infrastructure components include data pipelines, control plane services, and messaging.

*Clusters are hosted on AWS primarily. The terminology used in this document would be consistent with AWS. Azure option is offered as well.