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Aviatrix. What's all that about?

There seems to be an obsession over on Reddit about the Mandela Effect which was named after a collective but strongly held false memory that the eponymous Nelson Mandela had died in prison in the '80. It seems that our minds can play tricks on us and sometimes things which we clearly remember turn out to be a shared fantasy. I feel a little like this about those weird two weeks in about April 2021, in midst of the 'rona years, where everyone on LinkedIn got Aviatrix certification for free and then shared it with their contacts so that they too could benefit from a free certification in an emerging technology vendor's product. The reason I am not sure if it's a Mandela Effect is that I don't really think I have heard of anyone since who has actually used that certification for anything other than to pad out their Credly.

Nearly five years on my own certifation has expired but Aviatrix itself has not. I would love to meet someone who uses it and I have heard they are very popular in the US with businesses of a certain size, but I have also heard they have a bit of a churn of customers and I think I know why.

I have never quite got the name. Aviatrix. Although I have nothing but respect and admiration for the great many women in both the history of aviation and the present day, I don't see what it has to do with cloud management platforms. Oh, cloud, right. Nope. I think the name could be improved, or perhaps explained a bit better in their messaging. I am glad they have changed some of their marketing imagery - their certification badge is now a hexagon that tessellates nicely with many other certification badges including AWS. I rather hope that it's another Mandela Effect that leads to me recall a very awkward black playing card (a play on the certificate acronym ACE for Aviatrix Certified Expert); my CV did not need to be adorned with something that would have looked at home tucked into the hat band of a fedora.

Speaking of positioning, Aviatrix sits in an interesting position in the market. Rather like that perfect pair of shoes that you know you'll grow out of, or those designer jeans that only fit when you're at exactly the right weight, Aviatrix occupies a rather precise sweet spot in terms of business size and cloud maturity.

For mid-sized businesses contemplating their cloud networking strategy, Aviatrix presents itself as a compelling solution to a problem they might not even realise they have yet. The native tools provided by AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud can feel a bit like being handed a box of parts without an instruction manual. On the flip side, the enterprise-grade networking solutions often feel like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut, complete with enterprise-grade pricing to match.

The technical capabilities that Aviatrix brings to the table are rather like having a universal translator for cloud networking protocols. At its core, it provides what they call a "multi-cloud transit network architecture" - a bit of a mouthful that essentially means it can create a consistent networking layer across different cloud providers. This becomes particularly valuable when you're dealing with the headache of connecting, say, your AWS workloads with those Azure services that your development team absolutely insisted they needed.

One of the more clever bits is how it handles encryption. Rather than wrestling with the native IPsec implementations of each cloud provider (which, let's be honest, can be about as cooperative as a cat at bath time), Aviatrix provides its own encryption overlay. This means you can maintain consistent encryption policies across your entire cloud estate, regardless of whether you're routing traffic through AWS Transit Gateway, Azure vWAN, or Google Cloud's Network Connectivity Center.

The platform's approach to visibility is particularly noteworthy. It offers something called "CoPilot" which, despite sounding like it might try to write your code for you, actually provides detailed flow analysis and troubleshooting capabilities. Imagine being able to trace a network packet's journey across multiple cloud providers with the same ease as tracking a parcel - that's essentially what it offers. This can be invaluable when you're trying to figure out why Karen from Accounting can't access the new cloud-based ERP system.

However, where Aviatrix truly shines is in that Goldilocks zone - when your business has grown beyond simple VPC peering but hasn't yet reached the scale where you need a full-blown cloud networking team with deep expertise in each cloud provider's networking quirks. Their platform essentially provides training wheels for multi-cloud networking, with a unified interface that abstracts away the complexity of dealing with different cloud providers' networking constructs. The irony isn't lost on me that while thousands of us gained those certifications during that possible Mandela Effect moment in 2021, the actual implementation of Aviatrix in UK businesses remains somewhat elusive. Perhaps it's because British businesses tend to be more conservative in their cloud adoption, or maybe it's because we've got different scaling patterns than our American cousins. Whatever the reason, Aviatrix remains something of a curious phenomenon - widely known about, frequently certified in, but somewhat rarely encountered in the wild.

This positioning creates an interesting dynamic where Aviatrix becomes a sort of 'finishing school' for cloud networking - brilliant for teaching your organisation the ropes of multi-cloud networking, but potentially something you'll outgrow as your cloud maturity increases. It's rather like those L-plates on a learner driver's car - absolutely essential while you're learning, but you'll want to take them off once you've passed your test. And perhaps that's exactly where Aviatrix belongs - not as a permanent fixture in your technology stack, but as a valuable stepping stone on your cloud journey.