Cisco Brings Its SDN To AWS

Time for some blockbusting news! Cisco has joined the big trend of bridging the infrastructure of public clouds by bringing its SDN to AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud platforms.

Software defined networking, that is.

The company has basically extended its ACI, short for Application Centric Infrastructure, from the datacenter to the public cloud. Running it in the cloud will now allow customers to more easily manage their hybrid networks that span both environments.

Cisco announced this functionality in a blog post, detailing the technology, and explaining how it is integrating its ACI controller with the Application Programming Interfaces of the three leading cloud providers.

At the same time, the company also added that it is exploring whether cloud management programs can control ACI APIs — cloud management programs like the newly announced Microsoft Azure Stack.

Nevertheless, as Tom Edsall, senior vice president and general manager, Cisco’s ACI group put it:

“Customers are moving to a multi-cloud environment and in doing so more and more are looking for consistency across those environments so they don’t have to learn new tools and new APIs.”

Cisco currently has more than 4,000 ACI customers, and many of these are already using public cloud services. They will find this new service the most useful, as they will be able to implement the same network and security policy on premises, and in the cloud.

The networking giant has just announced its plans to implement this functionality, and is yet to provide pricing or availability details of ACI support for public cloud platforms.