Moving Application to AWS VPC Network: Simplified Multicast Migration

Migrating Application to AWS VPC Network with Minimal Effort

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Question

A company has an application that needs to be moved to an AWS VPC network.

This application is based on multicast and needs to be moved with the least amount of effort.

What can be done to fulfill this requirement?

Answers

Explanations

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A. B. C. D.

Answer - C.

Currently Amazon VPC service doesn't presently permit multicast or broadcast traffic.

In the event that you have an application that uses multicast to function, you can leverage GRE tunnels to create a mesh VPN overlay network between your Amazon EC2 instances.

Option A is incorrect because you need to set up an overlay network first.

Option B is incorrect because this would be a major change for the application.

Option D is incorrect because this would not help in the requirement.

An example of a vendor that can provide an overlay network is given below.

https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B071RMCZ1X

The correct answer for this question is C. Consider creating an overlay network between EC2 Instances and then port the application.

Multicast is not supported natively within the AWS VPC environment. Therefore, to migrate an application that relies on multicast, it is necessary to consider an alternative approach to address this limitation.

Option A, creating EC2 Instances in the subnet, will not solve the problem since multicast is not supported in the VPC network by default. Simply moving the application onto an EC2 instance in the VPC network will not allow it to use multicast.

Option B, changing the application to support unicast, may require significant modifications to the application's code, which could be time-consuming and costly. Moreover, there is no guarantee that the application's functionality will be preserved after the change.

Option D, enabling encryption on the underlying EBS volumes, will not have any impact on multicast capabilities.

Option C, creating an overlay network between EC2 instances, can address the multicast limitation. An overlay network is a virtual network that runs on top of the underlying physical network. The overlay network can be implemented using software-defined networking (SDN) technologies, such as VXLAN or GRE tunnels. The overlay network allows the multicast traffic to be encapsulated and forwarded between EC2 instances, which makes it possible to migrate the application with minimal changes.

To implement this solution, you would need to create an overlay network between EC2 instances and ensure that the application is configured to use the overlay network for multicast communication. This solution requires careful planning and testing to ensure that the application functions as expected after the migration.