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Experts skeptical an AWS switch is coming
An AWS switch -- reportedly possible in the next 18 months -- would not benefit the cloud provider's customers, experts said. Instead, AWS needs to offer better connectivity.
Industry experts said AWS has no need to build and sell a white box data center switch as reported last week but could help customers by developing a dedicated appliance for connecting a private data center with the public cloud provider.
The Information reported last Friday AWS was considering whether to design open switches for an AWS-centric hybrid cloud. The AWS switch would compete directly with Arista, Cisco and Juniper Networks and could be available within 18 months if AWS went through with the project. AWS has declined comment.
Industry observers said this week the report could be half right. AWS customers could use hardware dedicated to establishing a network connection to the service provider, but that device is unlikely to be an AWS switch.
"A white box switch in and of itself doesn't help move workloads to the cloud, and AWS, as you know, is in the cloud business," said Brad Casemore, an analyst at IDC.
What AWS customers could use isn't an AWS switch, but hardware designed to connect a private cloud to the infrastructure-as-a-service provider, experts said. Currently, AWS' software-based Direct Connect service for the corporate data center is "a little kludgy today and could use a little bit of work," said an industry executive who requested his name not be used because he works with AWS.
"It's such a fragile and crappy part of the Amazon cloud experience," he said. "The Direct Connect appliance is a badly needed part of their portfolio."
AWS could also use a device that provides a dedicated connection to a company's remote office or campus network, said John Fruehe, an independent analyst. "It would speed up application [service] delivery greatly."
Indeed, Microsoft recently introduced the Azure Virtual WAN service, which connects the Azure cloud with software-defined WAN systems that serve remote offices and campuses. The systems manage traffic through multiple network links, including broadband, MPLS and LTE.
Connectors to AWS, Google, Microsoft clouds
For the last couple of years, AWS and its rivals Google and Microsoft have been working with partners on technology to ease the difficulty of connecting to their respective services.
In October 2016, AWS and VMware launched an alliance to develop the VMware Cloud on AWS. The platform would essentially duplicate on AWS a private cloud built with VMware software. As a result, customers of the vendors could use a single set of tools to manage and move workloads between both environments.
A year later, Google announced it had partnered with Cisco to connect Kubernetes containers running on Google Cloud with Cisco's hyper-converged infrastructure, called HyperFlex. Cisco would also provide management tools and security for the hybrid cloud system.
Microsoft, on the other hand, offers a hybrid cloud platform called the Azure Stack. The software runs on third-party hardware and shares its code, APIs and management portal with Microsoft's Azure public cloud to create a common cloud-computing platform. Microsoft hardware partners for Azure Stack include Cisco, Dell EMC and Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
