AWS will make switches to go after Cisco – report Rumours emerged late last week that Amazon Web Services plans to make and sell white box switches for you to use on-premises. Citing a couple of folk familiar with the plan, The Information framed a story as AWS using white box switches to go after Cisco by undercutting it on price. Causation hasn’t been proven, but Cisco’s …
"tells world+dog that it thinks all workloads are headed for the cloud."
But the cloud is on-prem. If you are a customer of a cloud provider, then it's just that on-prem is somewhere else. Where is it exactly the author thinks AWS host all of these services they provide? It's certainly not up in the sky on an actual little fluffy cloud. It's across quite a few globally distributed datacentres all of which still ultimately rely on physical infrastructure and networks to operate; ummm... including switches.
When you consider the scale that Amazon continue to ramp up at then it does actually make sense if they can make, operate and maintain them cheaper than they can purchase and maintain them through Cisco. If they can then start selling those to other cloud providers - then they are double quids in right?
"tells world+dog that it thinks all workloads are headed for the cloud."
Except end-point networking, which doesn't tend to work too well if it's in a remote data-center.
If AWS are saving the corporates money by moving the workloads to public cloud (AKA someone elses computer) that means there is more money for other suppliers to take, with the obvious candidate for IT budgets being the office network - client devices still need networking.
... if it essentially links customers' AWS VPCs to their on-premises networks. The potential is more in edge routing than the inside the data center switching.
If Amazon only ends up taking significant costs out of on-premises IT, it could delay cloud adoption, rather than accelerate it.
Another alternative would be to provide an on-premises networking experience which mimics the AWS networking experience. Thaw would be highly disruptive to Cisco and the other networking players.
In my experience, AWS networking sucks.. they can't even offer proper edge routing capabilities, instead they offer a bastardised version of it. Every time I think of security in AWS (via ACL and Security Groups), i want to scream "2002 just called... they'd like their Stateful Firewalls back".
You can solve this using a 3rd party Firewall VA (Palo Alto, Cisco, Fortigate etc), but the problem is, the people who have brought into Cloud are DevOps Network luddites, who think what AWS offers is the best of-breed, and there is no need for Deep packet inspection, IPS and IDS etc, likewise they happily route 0.0.0.0/0 outbound.. Even when you point out, they use these very same technologies on the corporate network, they don't feel the need to do this when it comes to the company's "crown jewels" (i.e. its data in AWS!)
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