Accelerate Google Cloud Platform Security Testing with BreakingPoint on GCP and Public Cloud Resources
By A. Joseph Dupre III | Demand for deploying and securing network virtual functions (NFVs) on top of the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) infrastructure increases every day. Increasingly customers are moving their applications and services to public cloud hosting and want to have a choice in how and where they deploy. This is driving this demand for Google’s offerings in the public cloud.
With the 9.10 release of BreakingPoint Virtual Edition (VE), support for GCP has moved into general availability. To understand the application performance and security efficacy of the network functions they deploy on top of GCP, customers can leverage many of the same BreakingPoint application and security tests they use for Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.
When moving from one public cloud environment to another, you’ll find that there are many similarities. But there are also unique aspects and differentiators of each public cloud that may impact decisions and the trade-offs required to provide the best application performance for your end users while maintaining the highest degree of security. There is also a learning curve to getting comfortable navigating a new environment, even if you are already familiar with using BreakingPoint VE in other contexts. Getting up and running quickly with a deployment of the test tool is usually the first milestone a test engineer tries to achieve.
Figure 1. BreakingPoint | Public Cloud Tutorials playlist on the Ixia Training TV channel on YouTube
The Ixia Training TV channel on YouTube is a great place to get started if you are new to application and security testing of NFVs on GCP, or if you are very familiar with BreakingPoint VE but GCP is an entirely new environment for you. There are getting started videos showing the basics of deployment for each of the public clouds that BreakingPoint supports.
The OpenIxia repositories on GitHub are an excellent place to download and review example templates that you can reference for quick deployment into one of the supported public clouds. For example, there is a repository for GCP of Deployment Manager templates that you can use to quickly deploy a BreakingPoint virtual controller instance and a virtual blade instance. These examples represent the minimum needed to get started quickly and test engineers can customize the examples to more directly fit their application testing needs or as a reference for incorporating BreakingPoint into their own testing chains.
Figure 2. Hosted on OpenIxia GitHub, this is a BreakingPoint DeploymentManager template for GCP
Be sure to check out these resources from time to time as new releases of the products come out or a new example gets posted. Keysight encourages you to subscribe to the Ixia Training TV on YouTube to get notified when new content is added to the channel. Also, be sure to reach out to your local Keysight account representative to get more details on application and security testing in the public cloud.