This is a small account of how a need from our users, even CloudShare employees, become new features. CloudShare, believe it or not, uses CloudShare to test CloudShare. Sound crazy? Read this old post.
Recently, different teams in CloudShare (Development,QA and IT) wanted to communicate between VMs running in the CloudShare Data Center and our office’s internal network. For example, we had a developer who wanted to use the Office GIT server seamlessly from a machine in CloudShare and an IT engineer who wanted to test different product configurations on our Cloud in the same way. This need quickly turned into a new feature for you!
We then thought of a neat solution that could be the answer to our needs, and more importantly – even be used by our customers:
Integrating CloudShare’s new ‘Shared Environment’ feature with VPN Tunneling technology to enable transparent network communication between different environments in CloudShare and a remote site’s internal network.
CloudShare’s Shared Environment is an environment in your project, that communicate directly with other environments in that same project (aka: ‘sub-envs’).
A VPN Tunnel with an encrypted network connection is what enables two remote networks to communicate seamlessly and securely over the internet.
By combining the Shared Environment Feature with VPN Tunneling we were able to create the connection between the two endpoints:
One side being however many ‘sub-envs’ we needed in our Cloud, and the other being our office’s internal network.
After setting this up we found it was very smooth and simple to use, providing a secure and flexible connection. And it’s a great solution for some of our customers’ scenarios.
Now you can enjoy this new feature and bring the Power of CloudShare to your internal network for many different use-cases:
- Connecting your CloudShare environments to your onsite appliances.
- Communicating directly and securely over the internet from machines in CloudShare and the personal computers in your office.
- Using internal services located in your workplace seamlessly from the Cloud!
And many more!
More Technical documentation and configuration examples can be found here: