Understanding SmartGroups

This section describes SmartGroups and how they can be used for implementing different Aviatrix features.

What is a SmartGroup?

A SmartGroup is a construct created in CoPilot that is a logical grouping of your resources that are managed by Aviatrix. The grouping of resources may represent various departments or business units or other aspects of your organization based on how you group your resources.

The resource(s) you include in a SmartGroup can span different subscriptions, cloud accounts, regions, and VPC/VNets within your Aviatrix multicloud network.

A SmartGroup is a reusable construct. It can be queried against to support various Aviatrix features.

A SmartGroup can be made up of one or multiple resources.

When you create your SmartGroups, you can classify them based on:

  • CSP resource tags (Cloud Tags): these tags identify resources you can group. This is the preferred classification method, as this automatically includes new resources created in the Cloud with the same set of tags. In GCP you configure 'labels' that can be selected as tags when creating your SmartGroup.

    Tagged SmartGroups will not resolve for remote sites.

  • Resource attributes: classify by account or region.

  • IP addresses or CIDRs: for resources that are not tagged, you can directly specify IP addresses or CIDRs.

    At this time the maximum number of CIDRs that can be enforced in a SmartGroup is 10,000. This includes both CIDRs in CIDR groups and resolved CIDRs in tagged groups. See DCF Capabilities for details on ranges supported in the latest Controller release.

Aviatrix Gateway IP addresses will not be included in any SmartGroup, even if a SmartGroup filter matches an Aviatrix Gateway IP address. If a subnet or VPC/VNet is added to an app domain, the Aviatrix Gateway IP addresses are removed from the corresponding CIDRs.

System-Defined SmartGroups

For convenience, CoPilot provides two system-defined (default) SmartGroups:

  • Anywhere (0.0.0.0/0) - Represents all CIDR ranges or IP addresses.

  • Public Internet - Represents non-RFC 1918 IP ranges, or the public Internet.

System-defined SmartGroups cannot be deleted.

Viewing SmartGroup Details

You can click the SmartGroup name in the list to view its Group information (VM, IP/CIDR, or External Connection), Resources, and Rule References in the right-hand pane.

Features that use SmartGroups

Aviatrix features that use SmartGroups include:

  • Aviatrix Distributed Cloud Firewall (DCF)

    Distributed Cloud Firewall uses micro-segmentation to provide granular network security policies for distributed applications in the Cloud. Distributed Cloud Firewall enables network policy enforcement between SmartGroups you define in a single Cloud or across multiple Clouds. You can configure policies to filter traffic between applications residing in the SmartGroups.

    For more information about using SmartGroups for DCF, see Secure Networking with Distributed Cloud Firewall.