This article is based on reporting originally published on devops.com in May 2020, covering the Cisco–Google partnership announcement.
Cisco and Google Extend Their Technology Alliance
Cisco Systems and Google announced an extension of their existing technology partnership aimed at tighter integration between Cisco’s software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) platform and Google’s cloud infrastructure. The collaboration spans multiple layers of the stack—from Kubernetes orchestration to cloud management tooling—and points toward a future in which network provisioning becomes a fully programmable, API-driven activity embedded in standard DevOps workflows.
A key milestone in this expanded alliance was the planned availability of Cisco SD-WAN software running on Google Anthos, Google’s Kubernetes-based hybrid and multi-cloud platform. Anthos is notable because it can be deployed across public clouds and on-premises environments under a consistent management model—a property that makes it attractive for enterprises managing heterogeneous infrastructure.
Why SD-WAN Is Moving to the Cloud
John Apostolopoulos, Vice President and CTO of the Intent-Based Networking Group at Cisco, cited the COVID-19 pandemic as an accelerant for cloud-hosted SD-WAN adoption. With remote work surging, many organizations reconsidered their reliance on traditional VPN infrastructure and began evaluating SD-WAN as a more scalable, flexible alternative.
Crucially, Apostolopoulos noted that a growing share of new SD-WAN deployments are expected to land in public cloud environments rather than in on-premises data centers. This shift has direct consequences for how networking services are consumed: instead of configuring physical routers and switches, teams increasingly invoke SD-WAN capabilities through cloud-resident APIs.
The Convergence of NetOps and DevOps
Perhaps the most significant organizational implication of this trend is the narrowing gap between NetOps (network operations) and DevOps (software development and operations) disciplines. Historically, these two teams have operated largely in silos. Developers and application teams would submit tickets and wait days or weeks for network changes to be manually provisioned by dedicated networking staff.
As SD-WAN services become software-defined, API-accessible resources on cloud platforms, DevOps teams gain the ability to programmatically request and configure network connectivity as part of their deployment pipelines—the same way they already provision compute or storage. Apostolopoulos acknowledged that networking specialists will remain essential for performance optimization and complex design decisions, but the era of weeks-long manual provisioning cycles is coming to an end.
Centralized Management Across Multiple Clouds
Cisco’s strategic bet is that enterprises would rather extend a familiar, consistent enterprise networking layer across multiple clouds than adopt and integrate fragmented, cloud-native networking services from each hyperscaler independently. The proposed value proposition is straightforward:
- Consistency: A single management console backed by a uniform API surface across AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, and on-premises environments.
- Reduced integration overhead: Avoiding the engineering cost of stitching together heterogeneous networking and security controls from multiple vendors.
- Integrated security: Cisco positioned its security portfolio as a natural complement to SD-WAN, with the goal of delivering networking and security controls through the same management plane.
Apostolopoulos framed this as a total-cost-of-ownership argument: while Cisco may not always offer the lowest per-device price, the cumulative integration cost of multi-vendor networking and security stacks can quickly erode any per-unit savings.
Implications for DevOps Teams
For DevOps practitioners, this partnership signals several practical shifts worth tracking:
- Infrastructure-as-Code for networking: SD-WAN APIs on cloud platforms make it feasible to define network topology and policy in code, version-control it, and deploy it through CI/CD pipelines alongside application code.
- Faster release cycles: Eliminating manual NetOps handoffs removes a traditional bottleneck in application deployment workflows.
- Shared observability: Cloud-hosted SD-WAN management consoles can expose telemetry that both NetOps and DevOps teams consume, enabling joint troubleshooting and SLO accountability.
- Security as code: Integrated security policies tied to the SD-WAN layer can be applied programmatically, reducing the gap between security intent and enforcement.
The Bigger Picture: Networking as a Software Service
The Cisco–Google alliance is one visible data point in a broader industry movement: the gradual transformation of enterprise networking from a hardware-centric discipline into a software-driven, API-first practice. The Anthos integration illustrates how Kubernetes—originally a container orchestration platform—is becoming an organizing layer not just for compute workloads but for network and security policy as well.
Whether this trajectory leads to the full absorption of NetOps roles into DevOps teams or to a redefined, more software-fluent network engineering function remains an open organizational question. What is clear is that enterprises maintaining static, manually operated network infrastructure will find it increasingly difficult to match the deployment velocity and agility expected in cloud-native application environments.