Cloud-native computing is transforming the enterprise network as containers carry not only application workloads but more infrastructure functions as well.

For enterprises that are implementing policy-based routing in their multiclouds, the journey to incorporating this functionality into their container orchestration backplanes includes the following principal steps:

Implement multicloud policy routing with the agility to support complex mesh topologies

Increasingly, enterprises are bringing service mesh topology into the core of their multicloud initiatives. To address these growing requirements, the principal public cloud providers have built out impressive service mesh capabilities. Cloud providers are ramping up their support for managed services that simplify interconnection and management of thousands of virtual private over mesh, hub-and-spoke and other complex multicloud architectures.

Wikibon expects that more enterprises will seek the ability to internetwork these meshes into hybridized deployment patterns of every variety. At the same time, enterprises will require mesh-enabling software-defined wide-area networking infrastructure to bridge transparently between containerized on-premises assets and diverse public cloud providers’ offerings.

Adoption of cloud-native industry service-mesh initiatives — most notably Istio — will enable enterprises to proactively monitor, control and optimize meshes through the proverbial single pane of glass. In this way, enterprises will be able to leverage service meshes to strengthen the reliability and boost the performance of multicloud applications and connections.

Implement policies in Kubernetes-orchestrated containers running in optimized multicloud controllers

Kubernetes is a potential platform for containerized orchestration of functions more deeply into the network and systems layers. Enterprises will evolve their multicloud network backplanes to incorporate more routing, policy, security and traffic management capabilities in containers that are orchestrated through Kubernetes.

Software-defined wide-area networking on a Kubernetes backplane is a powerful way to do application-level routing. It supplements the network-layer routing that has long been the mainstay of most networks. It also adds the ability for infrastructure components to introspect containerized content payloads to drive more congestion management, intrusion detection and security functions.

Wikibon expects that Kubernetes-orchestrated network policies will increasingly be deployed in infrastructure controllers. These will ensure consistent processing of policy-driven routing decisions across hybrid private and public clouds. These controllers, to be provided by all leading network virtualization vendors, will support 24-by-7, lights-out policy-based programmable automation of multicloud network management operations. The controllers will translate enterprise private-cloud network and security policies into equivalent instructions governing the behavior of network components, including virtual switches and firewalls, that run in target public clouds.

As this trend intensifies, vendors will embed this containerized network routing capability into a growing range of edge gateways, on-premises computing/storage racks and device-level container runtimes to manage distributed Kubernetes backplanes.

Run AI-enhanced network policy controllers throughout the multicloud

Wikibon expects that more of these multicloud network backplanes will run on hyperconverged infrastructure platforms. These will support flexible scale-out of the compute, memory, storage and bandwidth needed to supporting growing network traffic and more complex machine learning-driven, closed-loop optimization patterns.

As a key element of what’s increasingly called AIOps, these AI-enhanced software-defined networking capabilities will include intent-based networking, application-aware firewalling, intrusion prevention, health monitoring, anti-malware and URL filtering. In addition, blockchain and other hyperledger backbones will evolve to provide an immutable audit log for the network-, system- and application-level data that is used to train all of these AI-driven policy controllers throughout the multicloud.

Another key step in the enterprise multicloud journey is the Cisco Live conference taking place Jan. 28-Feb. 1 in Barcelona. Please tune into theCUBE for live interviews with Cisco executives, developers, partners and customers during Cisco Live.

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