Aviatrix aims to bring multi-cloud networking, security, and operational visibility capabilities that enterprises customers require. Aviatrix software leverages public cloud provider APIs to interact with and directly program native cloud networking constructs, abstracting the unique complexities of each cloud to form one network data plane, and adds advanced networking and security features.
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Cisco ACI
Score 8.0 out of 10
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Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) is network virtualization technology.
This product offers simple ways to manage network routing between public cloud, on-prem, and external network. It has built-in options to secure network traffic, as well as option to direct traffic to 3rd party security products for a more advanced traffic inspection. The core function works and is easy to operate. On the other hand, I am unable to give it more than 7-star because some useful features are lacking. This includes lack of customization in email alerting, IPS policy management, and temproarily admin-down of an established site to site VPN connection.
I feel that Cisco ACI is quite good at different architecture designs. You can have it as just a straight layer two network. You can have it like we have with a vast layer three network and I think just for the layer three network it has easen up the use. I think the use cases for layer three networking is better for ACI. If you just want to do the layer two, you can still use Cisco Nexus and so on and that should be almost simpler in some way.
With a few very easy steps to establish routing between AWS VPC
Easy procedures to establish site to site VPN connection with external parties.
Provide network access control on routing traffic using its own build-in firewall inspection or directing traffic to 3rd party NGFW for full stack inspection.
Cisco ACI, The object model is very complicated. It's something difficult to understand and also because there is a user interface, there's a web user interface, but it's not optimal to use it because if you want to deploy a large amount of VLAN or a large amount of tenants, it's quite difficult to do it or it's quite challenging. Maybe if you want to configure a large amount of ports using the web interface, it's not appropriate because it takes a lot of time. It also provides APIs to do that, but as I say, the object model is very difficult to understand and there is very little documentation about automation of the ACI and maybe there is but it's not so easy to find.
I think something I've just went to a session with hyper fabric and the ideas that hyper fabric has. Keep it really simple because Cisco ACI is a complex system and adopt some of the ideas behind hyper fabric, bring it to ACI that will be really beneficial. So as I said, automation is a great thing, but it's still, you need to have the background and the really complex stuff that happens behind the scenes to leverage the value of that solution. And by adding more simplicity to it, I think that will be a great thing. And also integrating with other applications in terms of the automation.
Provided with the intensive fault isolation for the CISCO ACI, we are glad that we have this Data Center Solution in place and we will continue to renew as long as the future needed requirements are meet and more helpful features will be enabled in the future with the integration of security
The core function of the product works very well. It really makes network traffic management easy in public clound, as well as crossing different public and private cloud platform.
You'll need a lot of training and hands on experience to get the most out of the product. There are a lot of very useful features in the ACI product. Often times there are a lot of ways to get to a solution for chalanges in the field. The solutions might be different eacht time. Knowing which one to implement is somtimes a challenge.
It allways works. If there are problems with links going down by accident (say someone accidentally unpatches something they shouldn't have), we rarely miss more then one packet over the link. Also, using VPCs we are able to upgrade the software on the switches without the attached EPs ever noticing.
Day to day operations on Cisco ACI do not require much human intervention, the platform ticks over without any major faults. Being able to rapidly replicate the communication between two groups of machines across multiple sub networks speeds up new application delivery, and the integration into vmWare allows multiple teams within IT to work together to problem solve rapidly.
Cisco provides users and partners with a multitude of data for you to consume. I think that the stuff in the public domain goes a long way to assisting you find any answers you may need, plus insights and information from areas such as DevNet provide you with access to more than just the traditional release notes and the like
The Cisco ACI training provided by Cisco was in depth, covered all of our requirements, and allowed us to implement and maintain the platform without issues.
Being involved in the implmentation gives you more overview on how things are supposed to be working and communicating, you can easily performce troubleshooting and understanding the troubleshooting scenario
We initially tried using the native routing funcitons in AWS (transit gateway) and in Azure (virtual network). While those native options worked, it became difficult to opeate when we tried to impose security inspection on the routing traffic. This leads us to the Aviatrix solution.
Actually we start our learning in networking career with Cisco. So it is very useful or easier to learn this product. And honestly speaking, I didn't work in any other data center solution other than Cisco. So I cannot compare what it gives us more than other popular stuff. But this is very nice product like from Cisco.
Cisco ACI scales well and is suited in scenarios such as multi-cloud or large data centre implementations. It is not suited to smaller deployments as the efficiencies that it provides are not fully realised. It is well suited in large environments that contain both virtual and bare-metal machines allowing a great deal of flexibility. It is also perfect to support multi-tenancy platforms.
Reduce labor hours for network admin to manage public clound network routing policy.
Build-in security features may be good enough for small/medium size companies, and thus saving money from full funciton NGFW solution.
The Cost-IQ feature enable one to capture traffic volume of each VPC. This provides one way for the enterprise to perform cost charge back to various business funcitons at the VPC level.
We've definitely spent quite a bit of time relearning how to do things in ACI, but I think the investment has been well worth while considering that we can now deploy tenants and leaves from the ground up in a matter of seconds.
We can if we choose to upgrade an entire datacenters worth of switches in a single night. (We've chosen to break it up for availability requirements, but if you didn't require 99.999% uptime like us you may be able to do it)
