Hi All, I'm uncertain if this is an appropriate place to ask, but here goes. First, some necessary context:
We are a rackspace/colocation, IP Transit and Ethernet services provider; and due to the location of our primary site (in Maidstone, outside of London) we find ourselves providing a lot of reasonable-capacity circuits (1G/10G) for customers between Maidstone and <random location or DC in London> on a regular basis. This is achieved using our own DWDM ring into London and back, and enables us to remain competitively priced for comms solutions where customers are looking to relocate outside of London. Now, we have an increasing number of customers requesting interconnection services into AWS, GCP and Azure. Each of which has various 'zones' or 'regions' or whatever flavour they label it. But they are all in specific facilities and have specific interconnect points. As a result of this, we are running lots of small links/tails into individual locations for individual customers 'cloud' interconnects. This is very inefficient (and unnecessarily costly) for everyone involved; it would be much easier if we just had a few 10G ports into the 3 different providers and broke off vlans per-customer. As an existing LINX reseller partner, we already do exactly this and it works really well. Delivery is (almost) immediate, 3rd party circuit costs are reduced/eliminated and bandwidth can be adjusted on demand. We have no intention (or desire) to actually provide or manage any of the services within these various clouds ourselves - nor do we wish to offer any cloud-based solutions ourselves. This is (typically) what our direct customers are doing; and they are the ones providing the end-users with the complete solutions and we have no interest in competing with our own customers of course. All we wish to do is to get the physical interconnections pre-provisioned with all of the relevant providers and then be able to (reasonably quickly) breakout vlans, per-customer, as a new order comes in. Someone on my team has been looking into this and, thus far, has been unable to find how this is actually achieved. However, they have found plenty of information on how to become a solutions partner or a reseller-integrator (i.e. buying cloud resources, adding your software/product or management solution and then re-selling to the client) - but nothing about just "getting a port" so you can enable the customer to pick up their existing services and backhaul them to their racks. I am not saying we have done an exhaustive search by any means, but since we have a need to move forwards with this quite quickly, I thought I'd take a leap and ask on here as I imagine many of you have already been through this and may know the quickest route. Happy for either direct responses or on-list, whatever you feel is appropriate. Thanks for reading! Rob Robert Williams Custodian Data Centres https://www.CustodianDC.com
