Extending Your Network to the Hybrid Cloud: Achieving Consistency with Arista CloudEOS

Extending Network to the Cloud: Table of Contents

Frequently Asked Questions - FAQs

The enterprise shift towards hybrid and multi-cloud strategies is undeniable, offering unparalleled flexibility, scalability, and access to specialized services. However, this distributed model introduces significant networking challenges if not managed with a consistent architectural and operational approach. Extending the efficiency, security, and agility of your modernized on-premises network into public and private clouds is paramount. Arista CloudEOS®, in conjunction with CloudVision®, is designed to bridge this gap, enabling organizations to build and manage a unified, consistent network architecture across their entire IT landscape.

The Hybrid Imperative: Why Network Consistency is Non-Negotiable in the Hybrid Cloud

Operating a mix of on-premises infrastructure and services from multiple public cloud providers (e.g., AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform) can lead to substantial networking complexities without a unifying strategy. Key challenges include:

Operational Silos & Increased Complexity: Managing diverse network environments with disparate tools, APIs, and operational models leads to fragmentation, duplicated effort, higher costs, and increased misconfiguration risks.
Inconsistent Security Posture: Applying uniform security policies and segmentation across varied cloud security constructs and on-premises systems is exceedingly difficult, often creating security gaps.
Application Performance Hurdles: Ensuring reliable, low-latency connectivity for distributed applications whose components span on-premises and multiple clouds requires sophisticated traffic management.
Workload Mobility Constraints: Seamlessly migrating workloads depends on consistent network services and IP addressing. Without a unified network, this becomes complex and disruptive.
Lack of End-to-End Visibility: Gaining a single view of network traffic, performance, and security events across the data center, WAN, and cloud VPCs/VNets is vital but challenging.

These issues underscore the critical need for a network extension solution that provides architectural and operational consistency across all environments.

Arista CloudEOS®: Bridging On-Premises and Cloud Environments

Arista CloudEOS is the virtualized software form of Arista’s robust Extensible Operating System (EOS), delivering the same powerful routing, security, and telemetry features as Arista’s physical appliances—now deployable across VMs, containers, and public clouds. It acts as a powerful software router and network services platform, specifically engineered to extend consistent networking capabilities.

Key Capabilities of Arista CloudEOS:

Cloud Network Private Segments (CNPS): This Arista feature leverages VXLAN and IPsec to create secure, global Virtual Private Networks (VPNs). CNPS can span different cloud regions and providers, enabling a consistent segmentation model that extends network trust zones from the data center into the cloud.
High-Performance Data Plane: For demanding cloud workloads, CloudEOS utilizes technologies like the Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) and Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) to increase throughput, reduce latency and jitter, and minimize CPU utilization on the host instance.
Cloud High Availability (HA): Incorporates mechanisms such as Bidirectional Forwarding Detection (BFD) and Equal-Cost Multi-Path (ECMP) routing to ensure fast failure recovery and maintain continuous operation.
Flexible Deployment & Consumption: Readily available through major public cloud marketplaces (AWS, Azure, GCP), often with Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG) consumption models. It can also be deployed on-premises on supported hypervisors or as cloud-native instances.

Achieving Consistent Operations, Automation, and Workload Mobility with CloudEOS & CloudVision®

The true power of CloudEOS is realized when managed by Arista CloudVision®, creating a unified platform for the entire hybrid network landscape. This combination delivers:

Seamless Workload Mobility: By extending Layer 2 and Layer 3 overlays across hybrid environments (often using VXLAN within CNPS), CloudEOS allows enterprises to maintain consistent IP addressing and routing—eliminating one of the biggest obstacles to seamless workload mobility and simplifying VM/application migration or cloud bursting.
Unified Security Policy Enforcement: CNPS allows enterprises to extend existing network trust zones and apply consistent security policies across the hybrid infrastructure, maintaining a coherent security posture.
End-to-End Telemetry & Visibility: CloudEOS instances stream rich telemetry to CloudVision's Network Data Lake (NetDL), enabling network-wide visibility, performance monitoring, and advanced troubleshooting from data center to cloud edge.
Flexible Integration with Native Cloud Services: CloudEOS can be deployed alongside or as an alternative to native cloud routing options (e.g., AWS Transit Gateway, Azure Virtual WAN, Google Cloud Network Connectivity Center). This provides enterprises flexibility, allowing them to leverage native constructs while overlaying Arista's consistent management, advanced routing features, and deeper visibility where specific control or functionality is needed.

Real-World Benefits and Use Cases

The Arista CloudEOS and CloudVision solution supports a range of critical enterprise use cases, delivering tangible benefits:

Hybrid Cloud On-Ramp & Data Center Extension: Providing an optimized, secure, and consistent pathway for connecting on-premises data centers to public cloud resources and extending network segments.
Secure Multi-Cloud Connectivity: Building a unified and secure network fabric across multiple public cloud providers with consistent policies and operations.
Scalable Edge and Branch-to-Cloud Connectivity: Extending secure, reliable EOS-driven networking to edge locations, including branches, for optimized access to cloud applications and centralized management.
Interconnecting VPCs/VNets: Establishing scalable and manageable connectivity between virtual networks within and across public clouds using transit architectures.
Optimized WAN Performance & Multi-Site VPN Aggregation: Utilizing features like Dynamic Path Selection (DPS) for resilient hybrid WANs and consolidating VPN connections.
Consistent Network Function Virtualization (NFV): Deploying virtualized network functions with uniform management and policies across different environments.

Conclusion: Unifying Your Distributed Network Landscape for Agility and Control

Arista CloudEOS, orchestrated by CloudVision, provides a vital abstraction layer for modern hybrid cloud networking. By running the same powerful EOS consistently—whether on physical hardware, VMs, containers, or across diverse public clouds—Arista creates a uniform network operating system. This approach simplifies operations, reduces overhead, and empowers enterprises with an infrastructure-agnostic, agile, and secure method for managing their increasingly distributed applications and data. It’s about delivering intelligent, secure, and optimized traffic management across the wide area, extending the sophistication of the data center fabric to every point of connection.