News

Cisco's SDN Solution Strengthens AWS Ties

• By David Ramel
• 06/08/2020

Cisco recently shipped an update of its Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI) software-defined networking (SDN) offering, adding more integration with the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud.

Cisco touts the breadth of ACI, describing it as the only industry SDN solution that automates network and security for workloads across heterogeneous domains such as physical (bare-metal) servers, virtual machines, containers, or public clouds.

Cisco ACI 5.0 is an extension of the company's "ACI Anywhere" initiative, following up on last year's unveiling of Cisco Cloud ACI for AWS. The new version further tightens up the ties with AWS, specifically AWS Transit Gateway, which connects Amazon VPCs, AWS accounts and on-premises networks to a single gateway.

"Cloud ACI now supports the AWS Transit Gateway (TGW) automation for efficient and high-performance interconnect between multiple Amazon AWS VPCs," Cisco said in an announcement post. "The ACI 5.0 release supports automation of the TGW lifecycle along with automated route-programming on TGW route-tables for all combinations of East-West and North-South traffic patterns."

Cisco has made it a point to work with the AWS cloud in particular -- along with Microsoft Azure -- having announced in early 2019 that ACI was coming to the AWS cloud.

The company said at the time: "It delivers operational simplicity, application agility and protection in the data center -- all delivered in a uniquely open approach that integrates with all hypervisors and container frameworks on which applications are deployed. With ACI Anywhere, that journey extends ACI to any workload, any location, any cloud. Virtual ACI already supports bare metal clouds and remote edge locations. And now with the new Cloud ACI capabilities, Cisco extends automation, management, and security to AWS and Microsoft Azure by fully integrating with their Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) environments."

Along with more AWS integration, Cisco is planning more tie-ins with the Microsoft Azure cloud, too, with support for VNET Peering coming up.That service helps customers connect networks as a single entity within the Azure Virtual Network, while leveraging Azure backbone for low-latency, high-bandwidth interconnects between virtual networks. Other planned Azure enhancements includes shared service deployments, along with native and third-party L4-7 service automation functions.

Cisco also announced new functionality to support 5G wireless implementations and more.

More information can be found at the ACI site.