Cisco brought SDN to Amazon, the general cloud of Microsoft and Google

Cisco ACI running in the cloud will allow customers to easily manage hybrid networks.

Today, Cisco announced that it will integrate its centralized application infrastructure called Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) with the general cloud architecture from Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.

By extending ACI from the data center to the cloud, Cisco will help customers easily manage hybrid networks on both environments. General network management on hybrid environments will allow customers to implement the smallest security policies and manage applications on both, Cisco said.

Cisco will also integrate ACI Controller with Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) of the top 3 cloud service providers. 'Customers are moving to a multi-cloud environment and by doing so, they also seek to unify the environments so that they do not have to learn new tools and APIs,' said Tom Edsall, deputy director. and management at Cisco's ACI said.

Cisco plans to allow control of multiple pages when they are connected. This will allow IT administrators to create policies that unify all environments or policies specific to a given environment. Network segmentation, sub-segmentation traffic and creating white-list of acceptable traffic are examples of policies that can be used in this model.

The future brings Cisco's SDN to the cloud

In a blog post announcing this, Cisco also added that it is investigating whether cloud management programs such as Azure Stack of Microsoft can control the ACI API. Cisco also explores how ACI controls open source programs such as Kubernetes. Cisco only announced the implementation plan, but did not give the price or level of ACI support on the cloud platform.

'This is an ACI extension from the data center to the cloud, so you can implement the same network and security policies on both the real and cloud environments,' said IDC Bread Casemore. He hopes ACI's customers - Cisco said there are currently 4,000 units - using cloud services will find it useful.

Running SDN on hybrid environment is not a new concept. Last year, VMware also announced plans for virtual network software NSX to run on both real and cloud environments. Also last year, VMware and AWS announced cooperation running VMware, including NSX, on AWS.