I sent a graph today with the subject “Very good news graph.”
The MPLS ring connecting our data centers was complete, and traffic had moved onto the private path. Instead of passing through the production firewalls, the facilities could exchange data securely behind them.
The graph showed the change in firewall traffic immediately.
That mattered for reliability and performance, but I was especially focused on the capital curve. If data-center-to-data-center traffic kept growing through the firewalls, we would eventually have to buy much larger devices just to carry traffic that did not need to enter or leave the private network. Moving that load onto the ring could avoid millions of dollars in future capital spending while adding only a few hundred thousand dollars in operating expense over the period I was modeling.
The exact savings would depend on how traffic grew and how long the equipment lasted. The source is a projection, not an audited result. But the architectural direction was sound: put traffic on the path designed for it and stop scaling expensive security boundaries for internal movement.
This ring had been sitting underneath several stories from the previous months. It could help connect our DDoS mitigation provider privately. It gave the data centers a path that did not depend on the public internet. It also let storage traffic move between facilities without consuming the same firewall capacity as customer traffic.
The implementation took contracts, fiber maps, carrier work, network configuration, and patience. By the time the line appeared on a graph, a lot of the difficult work was already invisible.
That is why I forwarded the picture to company leadership and translated what MPLS meant in plain language. The graph was not only for the network team. It represented a change in how the company would spend money over the next several years.
A good infrastructure project makes the system work better today and makes tomorrow’s growth less expensive. This one was finally visible doing both.