Today, SnapRoute announced that it has launched the industry's first Cloud Native Network Operating System (CN-NOS) to accelerate application time to service, assure compliance and simplify run-time operations.
VMblog recently spoke with Glenn Sullivan, co-founder at SnapRoute at KubeCon 2018, so we reached out to him to learn more about this latest announcement as well as get his expertise on the trends affecting cloud native architecture adoption, networking challenges, the importance of Kubernetes in bringing networking into the cloud native era, and more.
VMblog: What market trends are
we seeing and how are these trends impacting cloud native architecture
adoption?
Glenn Sullivan: More
and more business value is being delivered via applications as companies strive
to improve the customer experience and address increasing competitive pressure.
In response, the way those applications are being built and deployed into the
data center has been rapidly evolving to accelerate time to service, enhanced
security and improved operational efficiency. This has ushered in new
operational and design principles that we call cloud native, driven by the DevOps
movement; a combination of philosophies, practices, and tools that increase an
organization's ability to deliver application and services at high velocity.
With
this shift to DevOps, compute and storage have fully embraced cloud native and
associated benefits; creating a much more agile infrastructure that can move at
the speed of application development. But throughout this shift, nothing
significant from network vendors has changed how the network enables and
services the application workload. Consequently, networking has remained costly
to deploy and maintain, and inflexible. More importantly, it is increasing in
significance as an inhibitor to overall business agility and growth.
VMblog: What networking
challenges do companies face in adopting cloud native architecture?
Sullivan: The
network (versus compute and storage) has remained static, complex and NetOps
teams are forced into being siloed operationally; unable to integrate into the
agile and rapid DevOps approach. The heart of the challenge lies with today's
legacy network operating systems; which are built in a monolithic architectural
style with a rigid code base that prevents businesses from adapting to rapidly
changing demands. The complexity of these legacy network operating systems
creates brittle network environments that are prone to outages, and restrict
collaboration between the teams that develop applications (DevOps) and the
teams that operate networks (NetOps). This results in significant increases in
application time to service, security vulnerabilities, and policy violations.
VMblog: Why has networking been
so slow to catch up with the cloud-native push?
Sullivan: Network vendors, to date, have benefited from the
obfuscation that is a result of making network devices appliance-like -
allowing them to be treated as exceptions or snowflakes in the environment.
With the operating system and the kernel there-in kept secret and hidden
- the network vendors can innovate at their pace, instead of the pace of the
operator. With decades of development invested in this obscured,
monolithic code-base and a wide audience of operators that have grown
accustomed to the "network way" of doing things has caused inertia for the
traditional network vendors from adopting cloud-native principles.
VMblog: How is SnapRoute solving
this with CN-NOS?
Sullivan: SnapRoute's
Cloud Native Network Operating System (CN-NOS) creates enhanced network
agility, integrates networking natively into DevOps
environments, and enables operational effectiveness to drive rapid, secure, and
efficient application deployment and business performance. With SnapRoute's
microservices, containerized cloud native architecture and the embrace of
DevOps, companies have an open, agile network operating system where features
can be added and upgraded without impacting the system (bringing value to
customers faster), reduced security expose given the ability to surgically
replace vulnerabilities in real-time (any-time compliance), and elimination of
maintenance windows (higher availability and resource utilization).
VMblog: Why is SnapRoute's CN-NOS
different than other solutions on the market today?
Sullivan: SnapRoute's
unique containerized, microservices architecture, along with natively embedded
Kubernetes, eliminates the architectural restrictions that plague today's
legacy network operating system; a single "everything and the kitchen sink"
code base that makes it inflexible, unable to embrace DevOps principles,
cumbersome to patch and keep up to date, and increasingly vulnerable to
security attacks.
VMblog: Why is the use of
Kubernetes so significant to bringing networking into the cloud native
era?
Sullivan: SnapRoute
is the first and only company to natively embed Kubernetes into the network
operating system itself. This empowers DevOps to deploy and operate the
application, while eliminating time consuming NetOps tasks, such as Access
Control List (ACL) configuration, that require layers of API integration,
multiple tools and human glue. By enabling the use of common Cloud Native
automation tools like Kubernetes on the network, you can remove the silos that
exist between development and infrastructure teams (including compute and
storage); and begin to view the operation as a single unit.
VMblog: What are the benefits of
the CN-NOS and who gets the most value form using it?
Sullivan: With SnapRoute's Cloud Native Network Operating System
(CN-NOS), companies can (1) accelerate time to service: adding & upgrading
features and fixes in real-time without downtime requirements and leveraging
native DevOps toolchains to automate and control network attributes that
support rapid rollout of applications; (2) enhance security and compliance:
removing, not just disabling, unused services to reduce security exposure and
thread surface of the network operating system and assure compliance at any
time with the ability to surgically replace only vulnerable services in
real-time; (3) simplify operations: maintaining policy control and NetOps
ownership while limiting menial tasks traditionally needed to support
application roll outs.
These operational capabilities benefits both DevOps
(focused on rapid application deployment) and NetOps (focused on operating an
application responsive network; agile and operationally efficient).
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