Instaclustr is pleased to announce the availability of the Custom VPC deployment feature.  Are you wondering what does “Custom VPC” mean? This is a fair question and frankly we have struggled to come up with a good name for this feature.   This capability has a variety of applications and is a way for teams to deploy Instaclustr managed clusters in any VPC of their choosing – as long as the cloud provider is supported by Instaclustr.   The name reflects this flexibility.

Previously, when you created a cluster on the Instaclustr Managed Platform the process would automatically create a new VPC and provision the cluster within it.  There was no way for our customers to provision a new cluster into an existing VPC. However, there are a few use cases where it may be beneficial to provision a new cluster into an existing VPC. Here are some examples that we have come across so far: 

• Customers with custom/complex network configurations. For example, if you want to use AWS Direct Connect, Inter-region VPC peering or VPC Transit Gateways then this network can be set up once for a VPC and then that VPC reused for multiple clusters.
• Customers looking to minimise costs. For some use cases, cross VPC traffic can be a significant portion of overall infrastructure costs. Locating all or part of the application logic infrastructure in the same VPC as the managed cluster can significantly reduce those costs.
• Customers with a fully automated CI/CD implementation.  It is very challenging, and in some cases not possible, to build this integration and automation through VPC peering (which is required when Private IP only clusters need to communicate across different VPCs). Setting up VPC and peering once and then recreating clusters as necessary will make it easier to implement a fully automated CI/CD.

Using the Custom VPC feature

1. As this is a new feature there are some important considerations that must be taken into account and we have not enabled this feature for all customers. If you are interested you can opt-in by reaching out to the support team.
2. After the feature has been turned on, when you are creating a new cluster there is a new optional field called “VPC ID”. If you supply it with an existing VPC ID then the new cluster will be created in that VPC.  Please note: the Custom VPC provisioning process assumes that the supplied VPC is located in the account which you have selected in the provider account field. You need to take caution to select the correct cloud region where the existing VPC is located. 
3. If you have an existing cluster that you want to migrate to a VPC of your own, you can do so by adding a Data Center which takes you to the page similar to cluster creation which has the new VPC ID field. Please contact the support team for assistance.

More information on this can be found in the support documentation.

Note that in the current release that Custom VPC support is only available for customers running in their own AWS account and only supports the provisioning of new clusters in a Custom VPC. We are currently working on extending our automated restore capability to allow cluster restores to target an existing VPC.

Many of our customers are thrilled about this feature as it has many applications and benefits including cost savings, potential latency improvements and flexibility in deployment. If you have any questions please reach out to the support team (if you are an existing customer), or contact our sales team.