AWS Announces Cloud WAN Availability With Cisco in Tow

Amazon Web Services (AWS) this week announced the general availability of AWS Cloud WAN, its managed WAN service that can connect site-to-site, site-to-cloud, and inter-region workloads in AWS.  Amazon Web Services (AWS) this week announced the general availability of AWS Cloud WAN, its managed WAN service that can connect site-to-site, site-to-cloud, and inter-region workloads in AWS.  AWS unveiled the platform in December, with many leading SD-WAN vendors quick to support the cloud giant’s WAN move. The cloud platform can now integrate with software vendors including Aruba, Aviatrix, Checkpoint, Cisco, Prosimo, and VMware. “Many wide area networks used by enterprises today consist of a patchwork of connections between branch offices and data centers that were optimized for applications that run on premises,” said David Brown, VP of Amazon EC2, in a statement.  Cisco also announced this week its SD-WAN Cloud OnRamp for Multicloud with AWS, which allows enterprises to deploy a secure SD-WAN fabric over an AWS Cloud WAN backbone.  The capabilities include automation to integrate SD-WAN policies with AWS cloud-native constructs, better security through the ability to integrate AWS Cloud WAN’s built-in network segmentation with Cisco’s SD-WAN to provide end-to-end segmentation, and observability for the SD-WAN overlay and AWS Cloud WAN underlay in the vManage portal. In general, the key challenges for customers around SD-WAN cloud networking are complexity and speed, according to Vipul Shah, senior manager of product management for Cisco SD-WAN. Enterprise customers are driven by the pace of business digitization and don’t have time to learn and optimize all the details of SD-WAN cloud and branch networking. “These customers need to get to outcomes quickly and are looking for solutions that can be deployed with radically lower learning curves and with automation that handles network service configuration for them,” Shah told SDxCentral. “Cisco SD-WAN integrations with AWS Cloud WAN address these challenges with a simple on-demand global network and end-to-end automation.” The Cloud WAN platform supersedes the AWS Transit Connect Gateway and Direct Connect products, which provided an on ramp into AWS and enabled inter-virtual private cloud (VPC) networking. The two products, in conjunction with an SD-WAN overlay, enabled AWS to be used as a high-performance, middle-mile network, but had to be thoroughly stitched together to integrate AWS with an enterprise WAN fabric. “Now that AWS Cloud WAN is generally available, customers can use it to interoperate with their existing AWS Transit Gateway-based network or migrate entirely to AWS Cloud WAN to greatly simply the process of building and managing a WAN,” Peter McKiernan, senior product marketing manager of networking at AWS told SDxCentral. With the availability of Cloud WAN, customers that have an existing global network using AWS Transit Gateway now have access to the process needed to migrate from Transit Gateway to Cloud WAN. AWS additionally provides custom design patterns, such as integrating with AWS Direct Connect, SD-WAN Networks using Transit Gateway Connect, and centralizing firewalls. Cloud WAN works like most middle-mile network providers, and makes it easier for customers to build, manage, and monitor a unified network that connects to both cloud and on-premises environments. Customers can build global networks in the AWS Cloud WAN central management dashboard by choosing AWS regions closest to their on-premises locations and adding their Amazon VPCs. Once on the network, customers can define how that traffic should be routed between AWS data centers based on networking and security policy configured in the Cloud WAN dashboard. The traffic then leaves AWS’ network at the data center closest to its destination, or as dictated otherwise by routing policy, and completes its final leg once again over the internet. AWS is not the only cloud provider to work on SD-WAN integration. SD-underlays have continued to gain traction among cloud and SD-WAN providers throughout the last year.  Google Cloud’s Network Connectivity Center, for example, provides a single dashboard for provisioning and managing VPN tunnels and SD-WAN interconnects similar to the AWS Cloud WAN. In March, Google expanded its relationship with Cisco to automate the provisioning of WAN links over the cloud providers’ network.  Also in March, Microsoft and VMware combined the Azure Virtual WAN Hub with VMware’s SD-WAN technology. In addition to providing an on-ramp to workloads running in Azure, vWAN provides a platform on which technology partners could extend their SD-WAN overlays across the public cloud provider’s network.