What is the practical meaning of the virtual network equipment of well-known vendors in the clouds?

Question

Computer networks

I see that almost all network equipment manufacturers (Cisco, Check Point, F5, Juniper...) have released their images for AWS, Google Cloud, etc. marketplaces. Even the same Mikrotik has the opportunity to buy a license for a virtual Mikrotik Cloud Hosted Router. It always seemed to me that Amazon / Google itself has already covered all the necessary functionality with its own solutions (firewalls, subnets, NAT, routing, vpn, etc.). What then in these virtualka practical sense? To solve what real problems in the clouds do you need to buy / apply them?

Answer 1

Of course, every cloud provider has solutions, but:
1) using a network solution from the provider is a vendor-lock, what if he breaks the price that is unbearable?
2) Cisco / juniper / Mikrotik have a rich history, almost all the functionality is from IEEE / RFC, this is not and will not be in the router from non-core
companies to nag.
4) Licensing algorithms are similar to iron solutions, which allows you to migrate to clouds with clear pricing
5) Cisco / juniper / Mikrotik have proprietary features that people also use on iron routers (same orchestration)
6) For specialized manufacturers of network solutions, the level of documentation and its up-to-date support is an order of magnitude better than for cloud providers
7) On Cysta / June, you yourself are free to choose the firmware version, for example, you do not need the latest, better stable. Or a patch for a bug for unused functionality is not important.

Answer 2

To create an additional perimeter this time. There can be a lot of goals and implementations, I don’t think it’s necessary to give a case here.
For equipment "monogamy" it's two. Suppose you have colocated racks in different data centers and several virtual infrastructures. You need to raise bgp between all this and build a star connection gre tunnels through ipsec. No sane specialist can guarantee performance in a zoo environment, when you can suddenly catch hell by mtu, by tcp window sizes, frequent tunnel flaps and other things that may appear after updating the firmware of a device from different vendors.

Answer 3

Firstly, if you use some kind of appliance for 10-20 years, then you get used to it and want it in the cloud. Secondly, there are hybrid environments. And, finally, the same F5 is much stronger than even AWS ALB, not to mention the fact that a few years ago there was only ELB with functionality close to zero.

Answer 4

There are two meanings:
1. Functionality
2. Unification of the park.
If you have, for example, Riverbed devices in your On-Premise infrastructure that harvest traffic and you have infrastructure in Azure, then you will need a Riverbed virtual appliance in Azure to compress traffic between on-prem and Azure.
Regarding unification, the cost of maintenance decreases if there is the same type of equipment, even if it is virtual.

Answer 5

Clouds is a common name. They come in various SAAS PAAS and so on. One of the varieties of clouds is the cloud as an infrastructure. Roughly speaking, you do not buy Microsoft office, but such a virtual constructor, in this type of cloud you create servers yourself, link them yourself. That's when you raise such a service, then you need specialized equipment such as firewalls, balancers. Therefore, vendors offer their solutions in the form of virtualized images. Plus, each vendor has its own ideology of how everything should be built, its own management logic. And if you have worked with Cisco for 20 years, then it will probably be more efficient for you to use such a solution in a cloud solution.