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Cisco's ACI Intent-Based Networking Solution Coming to AWS Cloud
Networking giant Cisco Systems is bringing its Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) solution to public cloud platforms -- including Amazon Web Services (AWS) -- in a major extension program called ACI Anywhere.
The company introduced ACI after the software-defined networking (SDN) movement picked up steam, threatening Cisco's hardware-based, proprietary, near-hegemony of the networking space. Afterward, it changed gears and called it "intent-based networking."
The ACI Anywhere program brings ACI to AWS and Microsoft Azure cloud platforms, among other new areas.
"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," the company said. "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."
Cisco provided further information about ACI Anywhere -- including the "technical magic" underpinning the service, customer benefits and more -- in a blog
post yesterday (Jan. 29).
[Click on image for larger view.] ACI Anywhere (source: Cisco).
ACI Anywhere was just one of several major announcements made by the company during the Cisco Live! conference in Barcelona. In addition to the expansion of ACI into AWS and Azure environments, those announcements included:
- The extension of HyperFlex into branch offices and remote locations to power applications at the edge. Cisco HyperFlex solutions enable enterprises to deploy applications from core to edge and multicloud.
- Enhancements to CloudCenter to help customers manage the lifecycle of applications across multiple cloud environments. Cisco CloudCenter Suite simplifies multicloud management with a single suite of integrated modules for cloud management, cost optimization and ecosystem extensibility.
- A radically simpler way for customers to buy and manage the technology across the entire data center architecture, via a single Enterprise Agreement.
Cisco published several posts on the new developments on its blog site.
About the Author
David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.