Cisco today released the fifth version of Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI), its SDN technology, to provide automation and orchestration to service providers. These features are especially important for network operators seeking to deploy 5G while integrating infrastructure spread across data centers, the edge, and the transport network, according to Cisco.

End-to-end automation is a growing need for service providers as they shift away from centralized data centers and distribute workloads, storage, and processing at the edge, explained Srini Kotamraju, senior director of product management in Cisco’s Data Center Business Group.

“They don’t want siloed solutions across the different domains that they manage, and they definitely don’t want to stitch the data center to the provider edge,” he said. “So it’s the automation function and it’s the visibility end-to-end that they need in a single place.”

ACI 5.0 supports segment routing on MPLS and Ethernet virtual private network (VPN) handoffs to interconnect operators’ 5G transport networks, and automated mapping of thousands of 5G application and transport slices, according to Cisco. Additionally, the ACI Multisite Orchestrator can now be automated from a single point across central, regional, and edge data centers, the vendor said.

The update also includes support for the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Transit Gateway that allows service providers to automate interconnection between multiple AWS virtual private clouds (VPCs), and the vendor plans to add support for virtual network peering on Microsoft Azure. 

Cisco extended ACI into AWS and Microsoft Azure public clouds in January 2019. At the time it said plans were underway to bring more public clouds, including Google Cloud, into its orbit, but Kotamraju said that won’t occur until the end of this year or early next year.

“We are rounding up a portfolio of work to support AWS and Azure,” he said. “For now it is AWS and Azure. We are looking at Google Cloud, but also IBM.”

In the context of multi-cloud environments, ACI 5.0 supports segmentation, multi-tenancy, Layer 4 and Layer 7 service automation, including third-party firewalls, and automation for high-performance interconnect between AWS VPCs and Azure virtual networks. 

Finally, the latest ACI release provides upgrades for containerized workloads, including support for the ACI Container Network Interface (CNI) with OpenShift 4.3 on OpenStack and AWS, and Docker Enterprise Release 3, according to Cisco. 

Two large service providers in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region have been using ACI 5.0 on a trial basis, Kotamraju said.