This article is based on reporting originally published by SDxCentral, dated September 2019.
What Is Arista CloudVision?
First launched in 2015, Arista Networks’ CloudVision is a network management and automation platform designed to bridge the gap between SDN controllers — such as VMware NSX — and Arista’s own EOS (Extensible Operating System) network operating system running on physical hardware. Rather than acting as a replacement SDN controller, CloudVision is positioned as an integration layer that provides a unified management plane across heterogeneous network environments.
CloudVision moves away from traditional polling-based network management. Instead of periodically querying devices for state information, all network elements — physical switches, virtual machines, cloud instances, and containerized workloads — continuously stream telemetry data back to CloudVision’s central data repository. This creates a real-time digital replica of the entire network, giving operators a historically accurate, queryable view of network state at any point in time.
What’s New in CloudVision 2019
The 2019 release introduced several significant enhancements aimed at expanding visibility, control, and integration capabilities:
- Third-party hardware visibility: CloudVision now extends network visibility functions beyond Arista hardware to third-party devices, using OpenConfig standards or a new software development kit (SDK).
- Hitless change controls: Allows configuration changes to be applied without disrupting traffic flows.
- Data plane visibility: Deeper inspection of actual traffic paths and forwarding behavior across the network fabric.
- Device analyzer: A dedicated tool for diagnosing device-level health and performance issues.
- Revamped topology overlays: Improved visual representation of network topology and service overlays.
- Network-wide search: A global search function allowing operators to query across all network elements simultaneously.
Streaming Telemetry and the Network Digital Twin
One of CloudVision’s core architectural advantages is its streaming telemetry model. According to Jeff Raymond, VP of EOS software and services at Arista, this approach addresses a fundamental limitation of traditional network management: the polling interval gap.
A practical example is microbursts — short, sharp spikes in network traffic that can cause packet drops. Because microbursts are transient, they frequently occur and resolve between standard polling cycles, making them nearly invisible to conventional monitoring tools. With continuous telemetry streaming, CloudVision captures these events with sufficient granularity that a network administrator can identify the precise time and source of a microburst after the fact, without needing to wait for the problem to recur.
The resulting network digital twin also enables rollback: if a configuration change causes a problem, operators can use the historical state data to identify the point of failure and restore the network to a known-good configuration.
CloudVision Integration With Red Hat Ansible
Alongside the platform update, Arista announced expanded integration between CloudVision and Red Hat Ansible, one of the most widely used infrastructure automation platforms in DevOps environments.
The integration builds on existing CloudVision Ansible modules and introduces support for certified Ansible Collections and Ansible Playbooks specifically designed for CloudVision. The practical benefit is that network teams can use CloudVision to manage and orchestrate Arista hardware while simultaneously leveraging Ansible’s multi-vendor configuration management and image management capabilities across the broader infrastructure stack.
Peter Sprygada, distinguished engineer at Red Hat, commented on the partnership:
“Red Hat Ansible Automation is one of the leading DevOps platforms for infrastructure automation. When combined with Arista’s leadership in programmable network software, we are able to bring more agility to network operations and improve efficiency for our joint customers.”
Peter Sprygada, Distinguished Engineer, Red Hat
Ecosystem Partners and Automation Use Cases
CloudVision’s telemetry data repository is designed to be consumed by ecosystem partners, extending automation capabilities beyond Arista’s own tooling. Partners at the time of announcement included:
- Microsoft Azure: For cloud-integrated network visibility and automation workflows.
- VMware NSX: For coordinated software-defined networking across virtual and physical infrastructure.
- Red Hat Ansible: For multi-vendor infrastructure automation, configuration management, and image lifecycle management.
For network engineering teams operating in hybrid environments — where workloads span on-premises hardware, private cloud, and public cloud — this partner ecosystem approach means that CloudVision can serve as the authoritative source of network state data, while automation logic and orchestration can be handled by whichever toolchain best fits existing workflows.
Availability
At the time of the announcement in September 2019, CloudVision 2019 and the associated Ansible Playbooks for CloudVision were in customer trials, with general availability scheduled for October 2019. For current version information and feature availability, consult Arista’s official documentation or release notes directly.