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IPA: AWS Hybrid Cloud Project Evaluation

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  • Year: 2025
  • Location: Bern, Switzerland
  • Type: Final project
  • Tags: AWS, Networking, VPN

IPA: AWS Hybrid Cloud Project Evaluation

Project overview

The IPA (Individuelle Praktische Arbeit) is the final practical project of my apprenticeship as an IT Technician in Platform Development (Informatiker Plattformentwicklung EFZ). I did it at Swisscom in March 2025.

The task was to prove that a redundant IPSec Site-to-Site VPN between an on-premises environment and an AWS VPC works, to monitor it, and to evaluate when this kind of hybrid cloud connection makes sense.

Roles and skills

  • Roles: Solutions Architect, Network Engineer
  • Skills gained: BGP routing, IPSec VPN, Site-to-Site VPN, Transit Gateway routing
  • Technologies: AWS, OPNsense firewall, VMware ESXi, Ubuntu Server, Cisco ASR, HERMES 5

What I built

  • On-premises: Two OPNsense firewalls as VMs on VMware ESXi in a Swisscom lab, each with its own internet line and public IP, set up for high availability.
  • VPN: Two AWS Site-to-Site VPN connections to the Frankfurt region (eu-central-1), each with two IPSec tunnels: one active, one backup.
  • Routing: An AWS Transit Gateway links the VPC subnets and both VPNs. BGP peering between on-premises and AWS routes traffic dynamically.
  • Monitoring: Amazon CloudWatch watches the tunnels. Amazon SNS sends an alert when one goes down.
  • Tests: Ubuntu test servers on both sides checked connectivity, speed, latency and failover.

Result

The setup met all requirements. The average speed was 314 Mbit/s against a target of 100 Mbit/s. The average latency was 10.2 ms against a target of about 25 ms. When the primary firewall was shut down, the connection was back within a few seconds, and the primary took over again once it was running.

The project followed the HERMES 5.1 project method. The full documentation has 205 pages and is written in German.

Documentation

IPA: AWS Hybrid Cloud Project Evaluation (PDF, 205 pages)

Links

Image gallery

Network diagram: on-premises and AWS Title page of the documentation

Photos by Pablo Wynistorf.