Arista Networks today announced its answer to the hybrid cloud — the Arista Any Cloud software platform.

The platform is designed for enterprises to extend their workloads across private data centers and public clouds. Initially, it will support these major public clouds: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. It will also support Microsoft Azure Stack.

In addition, the Any Cloud platform is integrated with the Equinix Cloud Exchange, which provides direct connections to more than 70 cloud providers.

“Arista’s Any Cloud platform transcends public and private clouds, radically changing the on-premises enterprise datacenter,” said Jayshree Ullal, CEO of Arista Networks, in a prepared statement.

The platform includes the new Arista vEOS Router combined with the company’s CloudVision functionality.

In terms of the vEOS Router, it’s the same Extensible Operating System (EOS) that runs across the Arista switching family. But the vEOS Router runs as a hypervisor package. The “router” part of vEOS Router “is because we’re providing primarily a router function; a software data plane for routing use cases,” said Jeff Raymond, Arista’s VP of EOS products and services.

“The key point is it’s the same software image we run across all our switches,” said Raymond. “It’s the same familiar APIs that EOS has always provided.”

The Any Cloud platform also uses Arista’s CloudVision technology that streams network state data to provide real-time and historic visibility into networks. The CloudVision software also has been beefed up with a new feature called Cloud Tracer that pulls data across all cloud platforms.

Arista had to go through a certification process with each public cloud provider it’s working with. Cisco had to go through a similar process to make its Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) available within public cloud environments.

Raymond said, “Our unique value is consistency of the architecture and consistency of the operations for the networking stack across cloud platforms. It’s just a single EOS; a well-proven software stack that extends easily into these new environments.”

Arista’s Any Cloud platform is in beta now. It will be generally available on the initial public clouds by the end of the year.

Editor's Note: The number of Equinix Cloud providers has been updated to 70.