Spooked Cisco chief phoned AWS, asked: You're not making a switch, are you? Network hardware makers can rest easy: the tech titan that is Amazon Web Services isn't going to be selling switches any time soon, which will likely be music to the ears of current AWS supplier Cisco. News website The Information reported at the end of last week that Amazon was mulling over whether to sell its own switches. …
AWS have been building in-house switches for 4+ years - initially to support 25Gbps before it was available from other vendors (https://datacenterfrontier.com/amazon-building-custom-asic-chips-to-accelerate-cloud-networking/) but also to support improvements in power usage and density.
Given that the focus of the devices is on data centre networking that is around 20% of Cisco's switching portfolio and that the data centre network market space is crowded already, I'm not sure AWS standing up support and sales infrastructure for their switches makes financial sense, particularly given AWS's optimisation towards their own requirements that may not fit a wider customer base.
The idea of Amazon selling standalone switches never made sense to me, but I can totally see them selling "AWS-in-a-box" hardware by the rack to their larger customers who have outgrown the current hosted AWS solution, which is actually quite expensive when you scale out to large or very large deployments (thousands of hosts or larger).
This would let Amazon keep their existing AWS customers, and those customers could still offload peak workloads into the hosted AWS cloud. Basically like a base load/peak load power plant arrangement, where the customer-owned hardware covers the base load, and the AWS-hosted machines would deal with the peak load.
With AWS trying to persuade customers to ditch their old datacenters and move everything into the cloud, I'm not sure it's in their interest to release a DC switch to rival Cisco Nexus.
But I reckon a small all-in-one router/wifi/WS-VPN which could be deployed into a branch office and give direct connectivity into an AWS environment could be a great concept to help move people away from on-prem servers. They can even throw acronyms like SDN around to make it sound sexier.
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