Megaport added regions and capabilities to its virtual cloud router, which allows businesses to establish private, on-demand connections at Layer 3 now from 19 metro routing zones globally.

The interconnection vendor launched the Megaport Cloud Router last year. It provides direct connectivity to more than 130 cloud onramps globally — this includes all the major cloud service providers like Alibaba, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Nutanix, Oracle Cloud, Salesforce, and SAP — and it allows companies to route traffic from a virtual point of presence (PoP) without owning or managing a physical router. The cloud router can also be used with or without a physical Megaport connection.

“One of the things we didn’t complete in the first version of the product was dealing with the redundancy needs of enterprise customers as they build those cloud-to-cloud connections,” said John Veizades, VP of engineering and product at Megaport.

The updated router includes bidirectional forwarding detection (BFD) for border gateway protocol (BGP). This allows for fast link failure detection supporting fast failover of routed traffic.

Additionally, a new feature called BGP Multi-Exit Discriminator (MED) supports virtual cross connect prioritization. This tells autonomous systems the preferred route to take for performance tuning. Plus, it allows users to quickly turn BGP on or off.

And finally, Megaport added Google API optimization to make it faster and easier to add MCR connections to the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) by removing the need to click between Google and Megaport screens to establish a service.

MCR is available in 19 metro areas, and Megaport will roll out these new capabilities globally by the end of the year, Veizades said.

The areas are: Australia (Sydney, Melbourne, and Perth); Asia (Hong Kong and Singapore); U.S. (Ashburn, Virginia; San Jose, California; Los Angeles; Atlanta; Dallas; Chicago; New York; and Las Vegas); Canada (Montreal); and Europe (London, Dublin, Frankfurt, Stockholm, and Berlin).

“What’s interesting about the metros we are covering — because the physical location of the cloud router is not as important to the customer as being close to cloud onramps — we are covering the major cloud onramps,” Veizades said. “And if you have a workload in AWS and a workload in Azure, it’s about how fast can you get to those two workloads. By putting the cloud router in the appropriate cloud metros we reduce the overall latency between applications you host in multiple cloud providers.”

Additionally, customers can use Megaport’s SDN platform combined with its virtual cloud router to connect between key routing zones across North America, Asia, and Europe. Megaport partners with 92 data center operators in 528 facilities globally.

In addition to providing low latency, this global network means Megaport can help companies push compute to the edge, Veizades said.

“We think the cloud router is going to be a foundation for other services that we offer over time that require a lot of the compute power we can offer in data centers all over the globe,” he explained. “It you think of the cloud router: it sits on a compute platform, think of it like a network compute edge for cloud. So we can add additional services and features in that platform.”