Arista has rolled out software it hopes will help customers more easily fuse enterprise-class networking with on-premises and hybrid-cloud services.
The company has rolled out two new packages, the first, CloudEOS Multi Cloud, normalises the network connectivity to and between private clouds or public clouds. The package sets up a virtual machine and can redirect traffic across the most effective and efficient networking path using real-time topology, in-band telemetry and other attributes, the company said. It also automatically encrypts all traffic on those paths as well.
The second package, CloudEOS Cloud Native, lets customers set up an instance of the network operating system as a Kubernetes container offering a fully supported, enterprise-class networking stack within Cloud Native environments.
Network-wide visibility
CloudEOS can be set up and managed through Arista’s CloudVision management software that provides network-wide visibility, orchestration, provisioning and telemetry across the data centre and campus.
CloudVision’s network information can be utilised by other Arista networking partners such as VMware, Microsoft and IBM’s Red Hat.
Both CloudEOS packages are meant to simplify cloud networking and let customers build and deploy applications faster, the company said.
“With CloudEOS we want to enable the DevOps teams to use the tools they are familiar with, add and scale and adjust their compute and storage and cloud service requirements in a rapid-fire and dynamic environment as fast as possible,” said Douglas Gourlay, vice president and general manager of cloud networking software at Arista.
“We also want the networking team to have the confidence to know that the guardrails are in place – the CIDR block for the ERP system won’t get accidentally duplicated, that someone can’t connect an external test segment to a production data store in the enterprise, and that critical changes and deployments to production segments may require a code review in the network, too, before they are deployed into production.”
In order to bring the DevOps strategy to CloudEOS, the packages feature a variety of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and DevOps provisioning tools such as Hashicorp’s Terraform and other standards-supported software technologies such a as border gateway protocol (BGP), Ethernet VPN (EVPN), Virtual Extensible LAN (XLAN), IPSEC, and network management protocols such as gNMI/gRPC.
CloudEOS enables, in about a half-dozen lines of simple code, the provisioning of an entire multi-cloud network, Gourlay said. The idea is to simplify operations by offering the same tools on physical and virtual networks, so network operations teams can use the same software to manage both, Gourlay said.
CloudEOS supports a network-segmentation mode that extends the reach of network segmentation from the campus to the data centre to the public cloud and each CloudEOS instance – whether deployed in the public cloud to connect virtual private clouds, at the edge of the public cloud to allocate bandwidth across critical links or deployed into a Kubernetes host – enables a consistent network operating model, Arista said.
Cloud support
Arista is the latest networking vendor to extend major support to the cloud.
Most recently, Cisco and Microsoft extended their relationship to make it easier and more efficient for SD-WAN customers to set up and run direct Internet access to enterprise applications such as Office 365 and other Azure Cloud services. In September Cisco extended its Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) technology and its ACI Anywhere technology to Azure to help customers grow and control hybrid, multi-cloud and SD-WAN environments. Cisco has done similar work with Amazon Web Services and others.
VMware also extended its relationship with Microsoft with the expansion of the Azure VMware Solutions hybrid-cloud service, with new advanced cloud migration capabilities delivered through VMware Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX) application-mobility software.
VMware also has a hybrid-cloud partnership with Microsoft’s Azure cloud service. That package, called Azure VMware Solutions is built on VMware Cloud Foundation, which is a packaging of the company’s traditional compute virtualisation software vSphere with its NSX network virtualisation product and its VSAN software-defined storage area network product.
VMware too has a tight integration with AWS and other cloud players.
Other vendors have joined the fray as well. Juniper earlier this year took the wraps off a Contrail cloud-based SD-WAN service it says will ease the management and bolster the security of wired and wireless-connected branch office networks. And Extreme Networks recently rolled out its ExtremeCloud IQ cloud-management application that it says uses machine learning and artificial intelligence and can be deployed in public or private clouds and/or on-premises to provide enterprises with network information and automation.
CloudEOS is available on Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure immediately and on Google Cloud within the next quarter, Arista said. CloudVision 2019 is available now.
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