There isn't a day that goes by at the moment where I'm not hearing the words Application Centric Infrastructure bounded about the office. It seems Cisco's market leading SDN offering is really picking up a pace. They've just closed out their 4000th deployment.
We're fortunate to have been part of a number of these as our clients are looking for greater efficiency, network automation and increasing levels of security across their Datacentre Infrastructure and their own private clouds.
THE MOST OPEN AND FLEXIBLE SDN OFFERING ON THE MARKET
Cisco has quietly been building out their ACI play with an ecosystem of 65 DC eco-system partners, supporting multiple hypervisors, bare metal servers, and on-premise Linux containers, making them the most open and flexible SDN offering on the market.
However, they've just changed the game once again by announcing that these market leading benefits will now be fully supported within AWS, Azure and Google Clouds. This is huge.
Clients are often required to consider a hybrid deployment of public/private environments for their applications, which has allowed for faster scalability but has often presented challenges in management, provisioning and policy control.
THINK MAPPING CISCO ACI POLICIES TO CONSTRUCTS IN AMAZON WEB SERVICES, SUCH AS VIRTUAL PRIVATE CLOUDS AND SECURITY GROUPS
This announcement now means clients can extend their ACI policies and workflows into the public cloud. These are configured through APIC (Cisco's SDN Controller) and will leverage native APIs in the likes of AWS and Azure. This means huge improvements in consistency, policy management, and automation without compromising on the much sought-after speed the public world has offered. Think mapping Cisco ACI policies to constructs in Amazon Web Services, such as virtual private clouds and security groups.
HARDWARE DRIVEN PERFORMANCE
This also means true hybrid deployments. ACI will integrate with software designed by cloud providers, to orchestrate a consistent hybrid cloud experience that balances flexibility and control, while delivering hardware driven performance.
A SEAMLESS APPLICATION ENVIRONMENT IN A TRULY OPEN MANNER
Finally, Cisco is engaging with public cloud providers to support open-source management tools. By running the same open-source software with a set of community-defined APIs on premises and in the public cloud, we can offer a seamless application environment in a truly open manner. Working with cloud providers like Google on Kubernetes, an open-source project for managing cloud-native applications, something already supported with the most current software release for Cisco ACI 3.0.
This is a considerable announcement, supported by a pretty cool tagline:
Any workload. Any hypervisor. And any cloud. Simply put, ACI Anywhere
If you want to find out more, then click here to get in touch with one of our SDN experts.