Expectations that migrating to the cloud is an easy “lift and shift” proposition often founder on the reality of incompatible operating environments — especially when network addresses on cloud infrastructure don’t necessarily mimic the ones used inside a customer’s data center.

Cloud automation software provider CloudVelox Inc. is attacking that problem with a new automated cloud network customization capability in its One Hybrid Cloud software that lets enterprises map their existing network environments to a new or preconfigured network design on an Amazon Web Services cloud. The company claims the new feature, introduced today, can shave weeks or months off the schedule for large migrations.

Large data centers can have complex network configurations for reasons of policy or simply convenience. Many applications issue calls to other services for efficiency reasons using internal subnet addresses such as 192.168.1.121. This works fine as long as the subnet addresses don’t change, but cloud infrastructure-as-a-service providers have their own subnet schemes. When addresses that have been hard-coded into applications move to the cloud, they may suddenly become invalid, rendering the application all but useless.

Hard-coding network addresses into software “is not a good practice, but it is often the case,” out of necessity or expedience, said Rajeev Chawla, chief product officer at CloudVelox. As a result, “Networking tends to be one of the bigger problems when taking enterprise applications to the cloud.”

Mapping existing subnet addresses to a new cloud network can require painstaking detail work reminiscent of Year 2000 remediation. “If you’re mapping two or three applications, you can grit your teeth and get through it, but that’s not the case if you have 20 or 30,” said CloudVelox Chief Executive Raj Dhingra.

One Hybrid Cloud 3.0 enables network teams and developers to map their cloud network design automatically, using cloud-native services and published application program interfaces. The company says its solution work in three different scenarios:

• If no virtual private cloud definition exists, the software creates a one dynamically along with required subnet and launch servers that map to source IP addresses.
• If a network map as already been defined, users can create and edit VPC, subnet and IP addresses in the cloud to meet their needs.
• If an existing VPC has tight controls over the creation or modification of subnets, customers can customize IP addresses for the application being migrated to fit into the existing network (above).

CloudVelox also provides for secure deployment over a private network connection, uniform database backups and support for a variety of Linux platforms in the data center. Network support is currently limited to IPv4, but will be expanded to include IPv6 in synch with AWS, which announced limited IPv6 support in October. CloudVelox also said it will provide its service on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform next year, with others to follow.

The service is priced at $350 per virtual machine or server. The company is making a free test available here.