Arista Networks today revealed a pair of cloud networking capabilities that aim to streamline operations for virtual machines and Kubernetes containers in multi-cloud environments and on-premises data centers.

CloudEOS is comprised of a virtual machine that simplifies network connectivity between public clouds with software-based provisioning. It also includes a Kubernetes network interface or standalone Kubernetes that can support a networking stack in cloud-native environments, according to Arista.

CloudEOS is supported today on a pay-as-you-go model in Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud support will be live in a couple weeks, Douglas Gourlay, vice president and general manager of cloud networking software at Arista, told SDxCentral.

Relatively few networking companies have focused on simplicity and instead are adding complexity under the false pretense that it creates more value, Gourlay said. “[Developers] want to deploy things in software, they want their entire infrastructure defined as code. They don't know why [they] need to wait for the network to do stuff,” he said.

Most IT professionals are motivated by three goals: lowering costs, increasing agility, and managing or lowering risk. Too many networking vendors are “play every card here and making it worse,” he said. Something that could take minutes if it was automated is taking weeks, and DevOps teams are frustrated by that dynamic, particularly as it slows down the business overall, Gourlay explained.

“Our vision — build an amazing operator experience — actually has to appeal to both communities of interest. To the DevOps team, it means run fast, go really quick, and we want that network to be responsive to the things you need in minutes automatically. To the network team, it means you don’t give up control in doing that — in fact, you get the exact same management, telemetry, [and] control,” he said.

Blending the needs of DevOps and NetOps best positions companies to deliver the business outcomes they seek to achieve, he explained.

CloudEOS automatically scales capacity needs in real time and is completely provisioned via software, according to Arista. CloudEOS’ cloud native component provides enterprises with a network stack to deploy containers as part of a Kubernetes cluster while using the same tools that are already managing the rest of the network.

“We’ve been doing microservices inside Arista EOS (Arista’s cloud network operating system) as an architecture of how we designed and built a highly reliable, component-ized systems for 15 years,” Gourlay said. Arista is further embracing Kubernetes because enterprises are deploying the technology, and some of Arista’s customers anticipate running up to half of their workloads in Kubernetes.

“This to me is a start. We’re making first contact here, and whether that’s expanding to more cloud providers or adding features and capabilities” like packet capture, observability, or monitoring telemetry within the system, Arista has plans to expand the reach of CloudEOS, Gourlay explained.

Arista intends to “level up these capabilities so that you don’t have to make a trade off between running something in the cloud and running something on the data center. It’s as operationally consistent as possible,” he said. “That’s the winning play for us.”

Arista’s largest customer on this front to date, an unnamed financial trading firm, has more than 500 virtual private clouds in operation today, according to Gourlay. “Overall we have over 50 customers doing active development and 10 to 15 in production,” he said. “I can envision over the next couple of years, 10% to 20% of our revenue coming from these kind of recurring business models.” Gourlay noted that he can't provide a forecast for the next quarter, but said that level of growth is an achievable outcome down the line.

Earlier this year Arista updated CloudVision, its management plane software, to enable software-based network provisioning and control that integrates with its network operating system. The 2019 release also extends network visibility functions to third-party hardware.