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Tag: edge networking

  • Cisco Revamps Portfolio at the Network Edge

    Cisco Revamps Portfolio at the Network Edge

    Cisco today announced a series of Catalyst offerings that combine the functionality of a secure software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) and a router in a single platform.

    Archana Khetan, senior director of product management for enterprise routing and SD-WAN infrastructure within the Intent Based Networking Group at Cisco, said the Catalyst 8000 series is made up of both physical devices and virtual appliances that eliminate the need for organizations to deploy separate SD-WAN and routers at the network edge.

    The high end of the Catalyst 8500 platform line is based on a third-generation Quantum Flow Processor, a proprietary ASIC that Cisco employs in its networking equipment. It is designed for data center, colocation and aggregation sites and, for the first time for Cisco, integrates 40G and 100G Ethernet ports.

    The Catalyst 8300 Series Edge Platforms are designed for branch offices that are transitioning from relying solely on routers to embracing SD-WANs. In addition to providing 4X better performance than legacy Cisco routers, the Catalysts 8300 series is designed to allow organizations to insert modules that are compatible with existing Cisco’s ISR 4400 routers. Compute and switching capabilities can also be added via a UCS-E Series blades and UADP-based switch modules can be added to create a software-defined branch office capable of running microservices-based applications based on containers on x86 processors. Cisco also unveiled today a Catalyst Cellular Gateway, for organizations that want to connect branch offices over 4G LTE wireless networks with support for 5G networks planned.

    Finally, Cisco has added Catalyst 8000V Edge Software, which enables IT teams to deploy Cisco networking software on a public cloud. While most public clouds already provide networking services, Catalyst 8000V Edge Software provides more advanced networking and security capabilities that can be managed as an extension of an existing enterprise network, said Khetan.

    Each member of the Catalyst 8000 series has been integrated with Cisco Umbrella to provide a means of managing networking and security policies via the cloud, while Cisco SD-WAN Cloud OnRamp integrates with cloud services from Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google and Microsoft to provide visibility into those environments.

    In addition, each platform provides access to a programmable application programming interface (API) library as part of Cisco’s ongoing effort to meld network operations and DevOps workflows.

    While Cisco remains the dominant provider of networking equipment in the enterprise, the rise of SD-WAN platforms that essentially replace routers in branch offices has created a slew of competitors that are gaining footholds in branch offices at the expense of Cisco. With the launch of the Catalyst 8000 series, Cisco is aiming to bridge the gap between routers and SD-WAN appliances within a single platform that promises to be easier to manage via the cloud.

    It’s not clear to what degree that approach will resonate with enterprise IT environments, but it’s clear Cisco is now more than ready to strike back.

  • LF Edge Moves Open Networking Push Forward

    LF Edge Moves Open Networking Push Forward

    A vendor-neutral initiative dubbed the State of the Edge was acquired this week by LF Edge, an arm of The Linux Foundation focused on defining an open source stack of software for edge computing applications.

    The State of the Edge project will be merged with the existing Open Glossary of Edge Computing initiative that LF Edge already had in place. That combined initiative will now be known as the State of the Edge project within the larger umbrella of LF Edge projects.

    State of the Edge was launched by Vapor IO, Arm, Rafay Systems, Packet by Equinix and Edge Gravity by Ericsson to provide free research reports. Arpit Joshipura, general manager for networking, edge and Internet of Things (IoT) for The Linux Foundation, said that mission will continue as part of a larger effort to advance open software-defined networking software.

    The goal is to define stacks of software and implementation blueprints that will make it simpler for both telecommunications carriers and enterprise IT organizations to implement open source networking software both at the edge and in the cloud, said Joshipura.

    That’s critical because as IoT continues to evolve it’s apparent that IT and operations technology (OT) teams will converge, he added, noting the challenge is enabling organizations to achieve that goal around using a suite of programmable open source platforms that are truly interoperable with one another.

    Existing LF Edge projects include Akraino Edge Stack, an edge computing platform; Baetyl, a cloud-based management platform; EdgeX Foundry; a framework for sharing data between devices; Fledge, a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) for common administrative tasks; Home Edge, a platform for deploying consumer applications; and Project EVE, a virtualization engine.

    Interest in building and deploying applications at the network edge is on the rise in anticipation of 5G wireless networking services becoming widely available. Most of the organizations building those applications will be relying on best DevOps practices to achieve that goal. Less clear for now is the degree to which traditional network operations will be rolled up into those DevOps practices. The more programmable the networking environment becomes the more control each developer theoretically can have over the network services being accessed by their applications. However, network bandwidth is often a finite resource; there most likely will need to be some governing mechanism that determines how much network bandwidth any one application would be allowed to access at any given time.

    Of course, the open source community is not the only entity eyeing the rise of edge computing. Providers of commercial networking platforms ranging from Cisco Systems to VMware are all focused on enabling edge computing applications. Historically, open source platforms such as OpenStack have been embraced by carriers. However, within enterprise IT environments open source networking platforms have not gained much traction. The open source community will need to galvanize around a set of platforms and blueprints for edge computing platforms quickly. Otherwise, many organizations will most likely turn once again to commercial networking platforms to provide services to edge computing applications.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Akamai Extends Scope of DevOps Integrations

    Akamai Extends Scope of DevOps Integrations

    Akamai today extended its DevOps strategy to provide tighter integrations with continuous integration/continuous (CI/CD) platforms and IT automation tools such as Terraform from HashiCorp.

    In addition, Akamai is adding support for serverless computing functions to Akamai EdgeWorkers, a JavaScript-based framework through which application logic can be executed on the edge of the Akamai content delivery network (CDN) now as a microservice.

    Greg Griffiths, product marketing manager for DevOps solutions at Akamai, said the latest additions will make it easier for DevOps teams to view the Akamai CDN as a natural extension for deploying applications. Akamai launched its first DevOps initiative last year. The goal is to make possible for DevOps teams to spin up new properties and make configuration changes from within the context of their CI/CD workflows, he said.

    Terraform support, meanwhile, will make it possible for DevOps teams to programmatically provision and manage properties and DNS zones as code, added Griffiths.

    As part of that effort, the Akamai Pipeline can now synchronize with the Akamai Control Center to capture any manual configuration changes in a way that then allows them to be incorporated into a CI/CD workflow, he noted.

    Akamai has been making a case for deploying applications as close to the network edge as possible using its CDN to reduce network latency. As part of that effort, EdgeWorkers allows developers to spin up microservices as needed. Those microservices can now access data embedded in the function, including all the data from the HTTP request such as cookies, headers, URL and query parameters.

    DevOps teams can now also more easily conduct A/B testing and feature experiments using cached content in addition to delivering different application experiences by modifying the path to cached images and other content based on variables such as customer location or time of day.

    Other new capabilities being added by Akamai include the ability to modify both the path and query arguments for a request and determine to which origin any request should be routed.

    Griffiths said now that more organizations are leveraging the Akamai CDN as a vehicle for delivering applications at the network edge, the next big initiative will be to make it easier to leverage the company’s managed security services to embrace DevSecOps.

    It’s not clear to what degree DevOps teams have embraced CDNs as a vehicle delivering applications. Organizations have, however, been leveraging CDNs to deliver web applications for years now. By providing tighter integration with CI/CD platforms Akamai is essentially making the CDN just another target for deploying applications at the end of a DevOps workflow. That capability may prove critical as organizations move to deploy more application code on edge computing platforms involving use cases that require data to be processed and analyzed in near real-time.

    Of course, Akamai is not the only CDN providers with similar ambitions. It is, however, already the largest, so from a DevOps perspective most organizations will soon encounter an Akamai point of presence somewhere soon, if they have not already.

    — Mike Vizard