Megaport's New Portal Features and Functionalities

By Jason Bordujenko, Global Head of Solutions Architects

In this blog post, we’re excited to share the details of some recent feature updates, each meticulously designed to provide you with more flexibility, improved performance, and a more intuitive user experience.

Over the past few months, our team has been tirelessly working to enhance your experience and extend the capabilities of the Megaport platform.

Thanks to all of our customers who participated in our feedback activities during 2023, including our in-portal surveys and Customer Advisory Board sessions.

In addition, our Solution Architect teams worldwide have also been collating direct customer and partner feedback on the most requested platform improvements, and engaging in a regular dialog with our engineering teams.

In this blog post, we’re excited to share the details of some recent feature updates, each meticulously designed to provide you with more flexibility, improved performance, and a more intuitive user experience.

These updates reflect our ongoing commitment to delivering on our promises to those customers who trust us with their connectivity requirements and extending the reach of Megaport globally.

Megaport Internet – now available in more places

For those customers in USA, UK, and Australia, we have further expanded the capabilities of the Megaport Internet offering and brought it into new markets.

The availability of Megaport Internet has previously been limited to customers who had deployed MVE appliances; however, after implementing a series of recent updates to the product and back-end logic, we’re now pleased to advise that this capability can be extended within the above regions from any available transit router location to any other Megaport location within the same continental geography.

Let’s imagine a customer that has recently turned up a Megaport and cross-connected this to their server infrastructure, but requires an amount of on-demand capacity to/from a public IP. It is now possible to connect a Virtual Cross Connect (VXC) between the port and transit router (and diversely procured, with red and blue zone independence within a metro or even across multiple metros) starting from as little as 20 Mbps, up to the available port capacity.

All of this capability is right at your fingertips, and provisioned within one minute.

Megaport Virtual Edge (MVE) – more metro availability in all MVE-enabled markets

We heard you loud and clear! Megaport Virtual Edge (MVE) has been a massive game changer for deploying SD-WAN and FWaaS environments at arm’s length in places where services are required, but where shipping and installing equipment has been difficult or costly to achieve in a short timeframe.

Thanks to some recent uplifts in the Megaport network, it is now possible to deploy MVEs in many more metro markets than previously available. An exact and up-to-date list can be obtained at our Locations page, by selecting “MVE enabled locations”.

At the time of publishing, this capability is available in the following (additional) locations: Australia (Brisbane), Canada (Montreal), Germany (Berlin), Mexico (Querétaro), and USA (Las Vegas and Portland).

Diversity zone visibility and selection for Megaport Cloud Router (MCR) and Megaport Virtual Edge (MVE)

Our MVE and MCR products have previously benefited from the red and blue diversity zone isolation provided by the Megaport platform. But following customer feedback on how to achieve deployment of these instances within particular zones, the choice of red or blue (or in fact, auto-population) has now been surfaced for the workflows in ordering both of these resources.

Subject to availability, you’ll be able to filter for the specific diversity zones within given locations where these resources are available.

If you are aiming for a diverse MCR or MVE deployment and want to conduct a review of your high availability options, there is still an overall recommendation to consult with one of our Solutions Architecture team – contact your Megaport account representative to undertake one of these reviews.

Price reductions on VXCs originating from MCR and MVE within a metro

VXCs from MCR and MVE entities to other destinations within the same metropolitan area are now charged at the same rates and pricing tiers (up to 1 Gbps and 1-10 Gbps) as were previously available from port to port within that metro.

That’s right, the surcharge on MVE and MCR terminated VXCs has been removed – great news for those building up to the 25 VXC logical limit with more complex network topologies.

Whilst the newly-launched Megaport Internet product is a fantastic blended transit offering, some customers prefer to bring their own IP ranges or existing transit providers and land them onto these products, and this is most commonly achieved using these VXC types.

New display and filter options to give you a better portal experience

For those customers and partners that have a large number of services with us, the portal is a breath of fresh air when it comes to managing connectivity options.

One of the regular pieces of feedback we received was to surface more of the attributes of these products and for easier list sorting.

Megaport has provided a text search capability on all records within the portal previously, however this has been further enhanced by a new drop-down (to the right of ‘Filter Services’ search box) which allows you to multi-select the service type (from Port, MCR, MVE, VXC, or IX) or contract term arrangement on those particular services.

The sorting options have also been further improved, with the ability to choose Creation Date, Name, or Service Location as your ascending/descending presentation option for the resultant service list. Handy!

Deep links now supported by the portal

Customers that need to follow an approval pipeline project, rejoice! All in-portal links (previously only available to currently logged in user) will now be shareable and arrive at the same location/screen for other users within that account, following their authentication (and subject to user permissions).

The deep-linking feature is fantastic as it allows documentation to be populated with specific references to portal URLs, which will trigger the authentication process and then arrive on the particular page referenced rather than simply defaulting to the services page or portal dashboard.

And a whole lot more!

As we wrap up this exciting overview of Megaport’s latest features and service improvements, we hope you feel just as enthusiastic about these updates as we do.

Our journey in revolutionizing connectivity and cloud networking is ongoing, and we’re dedicated to continually evolving our services to meet your needs in this fast-paced digital world.

Stay tuned for more innovative updates and enhancements from Megaport and thank you for your continued feedback; the whole team sincerely appreciates being a part of our vibrant community.

Your trust and engagement inspires us to push the boundaries of what’s possible in cloud networking. Here’s to many more milestones together!

Until next time, happy networking!