Why Invest in Cisco SD-WAN Edge Deployments

Today, many organizations are creating significant competitive differentiation through investments and deployment in edge initiatives. There are a number of good reasons for this. By expanding beyond the traditional walls of their datacenters to strengthen their requirements, organizations are able to improve operations and business resilience, achieve better security control, and even improve data sovereignty. All this while providing them with end-to-end visibility through analytics for optimization of cloud applications and edge compute resources.

Deploying with ease

There is a need to create a common operating and deployment environment across clouds, on-prem, and out to the Edge. Doing so enables integrations that are high performing, low cost, and provide the best resilience in a short amount of time across multiple public clouds.

In the use case below, we can use the Cisco Catalyst 8000V as our edge device, and deploy this using Infrastructure as Code (IaC). This is a common usage of the public cloud today. This edge software is a virtual router that offers routing, security, and network management functionalities as cloud services with multitenancy. When deployed in controller mode, the Catalyst 8000V delivers comprehensive SD-WAN, WAN gateway, and network services functions in the virtual and cloud environments.

Deployment with IaC

Cisco SD-WAN edge deployment provides an automated way to integrate public cloud infrastructure into the SD-WAN fabric. This is fully integrated into SD-WAN with common policy, segmentation, and security.

The key benefits of such an integration include:

usage of full SD-WAN capabilities in the cloud
interconnection of multiple clouds
common Security and Application Quality of Experience (AppQoE) policy framework — managed seamlessly via Cisco SD-WAN vManage for all physical on-premises and virtual cloud-based routers.

Supported platforms are:

Amazon AWS
Microsoft Azure
Google GCP
VMWare vSphere
OpenStack

In this new Code Exchange use case for SD-WAN Edge, there is a sample implementation of IaC for deploying the Cisco Catalyst 8000v on different cloud platforms, as well as auto-onboarding into the Cisco SD-WAN overlay. This enables engineering teams and development teams to automate and scale the provisioning and management of edge resources aligned with application source-code releases in a descriptive manner.

Generic Architecture

In this example there are two Gigabit Ethernet interfaces configured on the Cisco Catalyst 8000v device.

Gigabit Ethernet ‘1’ will be configured as a Tunnel interface and will connect to the SD-WAN Control Plane
Gigabit Ethernet ‘2’ will connect to an internal private network

In the use case the deployment scripts are applying a day0 configuration on the router which is auto generated with the provided Ansible scripts within the code, making the router work in Controller Mode and to onboard the specified SD-WAN fabric. The provided code is based on the premise that the deployment is done on an existing infrastructure – in terms of networks/subnets, routing tables, vpc/vnet and so on, and the IDs of those structures need to be provided as values for the input variables. The code to deploy the required supporting infrastructure like VPCs/VNETs, subnets, and so on is also provided, in case these do not already exist.

Get the code

You can learn more about SD-WAN deployments with automation here at Code Exchange. DevNet Code Exchange is an online, curated set of code repositories related to Cisco technology areas on public GitHub. Code Exchange has hundreds of code repositories. You can find code created and maintained by Cisco engineering teams, community contributors, ecosystem partners, technology and open-source communities, and individual developers. Members of Cisco’s DevNet community can use this code to jumpstart their app development and integration using Cisco APIs.