It’s challenging to know all the native cloud solutions available to use, it’s even more challenging to know which Cisco solutions are available for use with AWS.
You will find that there are solutions that repeat or even overlap portions of the AWS Migration stages. For example, in the Discovery stage of cloud migration, the tool you’d likely use for Application Discovery / Infrastructure Discovery is Application Dynamics (AppD).
It’s important to know that this is not an extensive list, nor should this be used in a silo; rather these are the most relevant products for a migration.
Below is a reference to the relevant Cisco solutions associated with the AWS Cloud Migration journey. Business outcomes will evolve as a customer matures in the cloud and so will the solutions to meet those outcomes.
I took inspiration to write this blog from the “Workload Optimization” section from the digital book “Cisco Intersight: A Handbook for Intelligent Cloud Operations” – Please consider connecting and send a thank you to the hard-working authors of this fantastic book.
IT operations have one fundamental goal, to deliver performant applications at the lowest possible cost while maintaining compliance.
Because of this, organizations turn to cloud providers to achieve a lower variable cost compared to an on-premises data center, which is generally finite in scale and fixed in cost.
Cloud providers such as AWS can achieve higher economies of scale, which translates into lower pay-as-you-go prices and effectively infinite infrastructure.
Having a handle on which application requires which underlying resources, license constraints, and placement rules are beyond the scale of humans.
As a result, determining the placement of workloads minimizing cost while assuring workload performance becomes a guessing game.
Cost Optimization Pillar
According to AWS, a cost-optimized workload fully utilizes all resources, achieves an outcome at the lowest possible price point, and meets your functional requirements(AWS, n.d.).
Put another way, the Desired State is to assure workload performance and minimize spend in the public cloud (Intersight Handbook, 2021).
AWS provides a vast array of instance sizes to achieve optimized workloads and various ways to consume instances in an on-demand or via Reservice Instances (RI) which are heavily discounted for a specific term, generally one year or three years. Think of RIs as a billing discount applied to running On-Demand Instances. RIs are appropriate for consistent and predictable workloads.
The challenge with consuming RIs is that the public cloud consumers will pay for the RI whether they use them or not. RIs become more like “the sunk cost of a physical server on-premises than to the ongoing cost of an on-demand cloud instance (Intersight Handbook, 2021).” This consumption model can create behaviors that lend to horseshoeing application into an undersized instance or neglect to resize an instance when a workload outgrows its current resource needs.
“There are hundreds of different instance options in AWS and Azure, with new options and pricing emerging almost daily (Intersight Handbook, 2021).”
Automation to optimize costs
The lack of expertise and security is more critical at the beginning stages of cloud than managing cloud spending. However, as organizations mature their cloud practice, managing cloud spending becomes the number one issue, and they struggle to forecast cloud costs accurately.
An average of 24 percent of the organization reported that their cloud spend was over budget and expected to increase by 39 percent in the next twelve months (Flexera, 2021).
This issue is further compounded when you include more than one cloud provider and requires automation to decide on price and performance vs. price for performance.
Assuring applications performance while optimizing cost is precisely what Cisco’s Interisght Workload Optimizer SaaS will do. (Workload Optimizer is a separately licensed feature set within the Intersight platform)
Workload Optimizer is constantly receiving real-time data on consumption, pricing, and instance options from the cloud providers and combining such data with the knowledge of applicable customer-specific pricing and enterprise agreements to determine the best actions available at any given point in time.
It does this through direct API target integrations with the cloud provider in real-time to add value far beyond any cloud-specific or hypervisor-specific, point-in-time tools that may be available. Besides being multi-vendor, multi-cloud, and real-time by design, Workload Optimizer does not force administrators to choose between performance assurance and cost/resource optimization.
Wrapping up
The underlying resources, license constraints, and placement rules of running workloads in the public cloud are beyond what most organizations can handle. While the organization’s capability to use the cloud continues to grow, so does its need to forecast and manage cloud spending. The solution requires automation, real-time information, and optimization to make informed decisions. Cisco Workload Optimizer has the ability to do just that and a whole lot more. If you’re interested in understanding Intersight and the components that make up the hybrid-cloud tool, you can find the documentation here.
Mike
Baker, M., Beck, B., Chosnek, D., McGee, J., McKeown, S., TerEick, B., & Vaswani, M. (2021). Cisco Intersight: A Handbook for Intelligent Cloud Operations. https://www.booksprints.net.
Snort 3 Anywhere is a containerized form factor of the well-known, industry defacto standard standard IPS engine. With this latest offering now available in AWS Marketplace you can easily deploy Snort 3 in your EKS or on-premises container environment. Learn more in Cisco’s blog.
Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer is a real-time decision engine that drives continuous health of applications across on-premises and public cloud environments to analyze workload consumption, costs, and policy constraints across the full stack. Learn more via the new listing in AWS Marketplace and Cisco’s blog.
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Now a cliche but once a reality, it turns out that the canaries, like other birds, are much more sensitive to poisonous gases than humans. The birds were brought down into the coal mine and acted as an indicator and early warning of possible danger to the British miners.
An electronic detection system later replaced the birds, but these birds served an essential role for decades.
The public cloud has changed the way organizations deliver, respond, and represent their customers, and organizations are building an early warning systems approach to their cloud. The teams and systems that make up this strategy are Cloud Center of Excellent (CoE), which provides centralized controls, tools, and best practices.
The purpose of these teams is to accelerate cloud adoption by centralizing expertise while reducing costs and risk (Flexera, 2021).
Flexera 2021 State of the Cloud Report
Unlike the canaries that provide chaotic monitoring of harmful gasses, enterprises have tools that offer next-level proactive and predictive monitoring. These systems allow organizations to understand the complexity of their cloud and oversee across multiple business units and functional areas.
Full-Stack Canary
Well, it’s not a cute bird, but it does overcome the spiraling complexity of cloud, hybrid cloud, and traditional IT. AppDynamics, ThousandEyes, and Intersight Workload Optimizer make up Cisco’s Full-Stack Observability platform. Connecting the dots up and down the “stack”-from the customer or employee-facing application, all the way down to the lowest level infrastructure (compute, storage, networking, and public internet).
Conclusion
When we consider the technical environment we live in, we recognize the need to monitor the entire IT estate. Like the canaries in the coal mine, the answer is to predict and identify an issue before it adversely affects customers and businesses.
There were a lot of announcements at Cisco Live 2021 this year! Attached you will find information that is creating a lot of conversation. Please let me know if you want to dive deeper into these announcements. The one-pager is free for you to download and share.
Cisco announced the Catalyst 8000 Edge Platforms designed to accelerate the next generation of WAN, 5G, and enable connectivity to hybrid and multi-cloud applications. The Catalyst 8000 Edge Platform includes the 8500 Series for aggregation, Catalyst 8300 Serries for access, and Catalyst 8000V Edge software for virtual/cloud deployments.
The Catalyst 8000V will be available with Cisco SD-WAN 17.4, so you will have to wait just a bit longer.
It’s an “edge platform.” Not a router.
Typically the Catalyst family line is analogous to Cisco switching; however, the branding and messaging align with Cisco’s intent-based networking (IBN) portfolio. The “Catalyst” name now unifies the LAN and the WAN.
With distributed locations, flexible deployment models, and hosting containerized services, the term “router” has evolved to be more of a WAN edge device. Calling these devices “edge platforms” versus “routers” seems to be more appropriate.
The platform fits nicely into the Cisco SD-WAN portfolio as it addresses security, on-box, and support for Umbrella’s cloud base FWaaS. Cloud-native agility provided by Cloud OnRamp for IaaS and SaaS for distributed applications. (If you haven’t seen this in action, it’s eye-opening!)
Expect other vendors to begin adopting these features into one solution as Gartner has already coined the term “SASE” (Secure Access Service Edge) pronounced “sassy” to describe the solution.
In addition to the above, the edge platform functions as an edge router like you’d expect with some new beefiness to it.
Catalyst 8300 Series, compared to the ISR 4400 Series offers:
Up to five times faster data plane performance
Up to 12 Core CPU
Native support for 10GE
Catalyst 8500 Series, compared to ASR1001-HX and ASR1002-HX offers:
Improved data plane with Cisco’s custome 3rd gen ASIC Quantum Flow Processor (QFP)
Inline Cyrpto
Native support for 100GE and 40GE
Catalyst 8000v Series, compared to CSR1000V offers:
Support for up to 16vCPUs
25Gbps Interfaces
and Many more
Lastly, there is no End-of-Life announcement for the previous platforms that the Catalyst 8000 line intends to replace, as of 10/20/20. I’d be willing to bet that these platforms adopt ThousandEyes at some point, which is an absolute game-changer.
Apronets 