Recently, at re:Invent 2021 AWS announced the preview release of a new networking service, AWS Cloud WAN. With this managed wide-area networking (WAN) service, customers can build, manage, and monitor a global network that connects resources running across your cloud and on-premises environments.
When the network is stretched globally and there’s a mix of various technologies, the complexity increases for companies to manage that. Hence, AWS now provides Cloud WAN as a global, managed service to reduce that complexity. With this networking service, companies can now choose how they want to reach AWS - whether that’s through VPNs, Software-Defined WANs (SD-WAN), or fixed lines. Moreover, they can connect their on-premises data centers and branch offices to the global backbone network of AWS.
David Brown, vice-president of Amazon EC2 at AWS, said in a press release on Cloud WAN:
With AWS Cloud WAN, customers can simplify how they manage a WAN by using a central dashboard to unify the multiple networks they manage today, implement network policies for performance and security, easily add locations, and automate advanced network settings. AWS Cloud WAN removes the difficulty of stitching together and managing multiple third-party tools so customers can now more easily keep their networks securely connected and high-performing.
Source: https://aws.amazon.com/cloud-wan/
With AWS Cloud WAN, the company also integrates with various other partners providing SD-WAN services like Aruba, VMWare, and Cisco. JL Valente, vice-president of product management, enterprise routing, and SD-WAN at Cisco, said in the same press release:
To help our customers not only meet the demands of a hybrid workforce, but also provide true end-to-end connectivity and security, Cisco has integrated Cisco SD-WAN with the AWS Cloud WAN service so customers can use automation to interconnect their users, sites and cloud workloads, reduce deployment time, and increase application performance with AWS’s global cloud network.
AWS is not the only public cloud provider offering a managed WAN service. Earlier, Google released a preview of Network Connectivity Center as a new service for network connectivity management in the Google Cloud. Furthermore, Microsoft introduced a similar service more than a year earlier to update the Azure Virtual WAN Hub. And lastly, content delivery network (CDN) and domain name system (DNS) providers Cloudflare offer also offers similar transport services such as Cloudflare One.
Craig Matsumoto, a senior analyst at 451 Research, stated in a tweet:
AWS becoming more of an enterprise network provider. Compare w/Cloudflare, which is able to provide your enterprise WAN and is becoming more of a cloud provider. Both using their own backbones for part of this service.
AWS Cloud WAN is currently available in ten AWS Regions in public preview, and pricing details can be found on the pricing page. More information on the service is available on the documentation and FAQ pages.