Last summer, 2019, Extreme Networks acquired the company , whose main products were solutions for wireless networks. At the same time, if everything is clear with the generations of 802.11 standards (we even analyzed the features of the standard in our article , aka WiFi6), then we suggest that the clouds are different from the clouds, and Cloud Management platforms have their own history of development and certain generations, we propose to look into our new article.
The history of WiFi development is quite well-known, but nevertheless we will repeat it briefly. After the need arose to manage individual WiFi access points in a coordinated manner, a controller was added to the network. Technologies did not stand still, and the controller periodically changed its image, from physical to virtual, or even distributed. At the same time, from the point of view of a holistic architecture, it was still the same WiFi network controller, with its inherent features of installation and operation:
- Availability of physical access and control
- single tenant (single owner or tenant)
- Hardware part of the solution in the data center
- Non-scalable architecture
This corresponds to stages 1-3 in the evolution of the WiFi architecture in the picture below.
Since about 2006, when some of the customers did not want to install and maintain WiFi controllers locally, Cloud Controller or 1st generation cloud platforms have appeared. For Cloud 1st generation, they took standard software solutions (VMs that were previously sold to the client) installed in a certain type of virtual environment (VMWare, etc.) that was publicly available. This allowed the client to use the installed software without dealing with hardware and software support for the purchased products. The main driver was the focus on flexibility, scalability and cost savings obtained by moving equipment and computing power to the cloud. The main features of this solution were:
- single tenant
- Virtualized
- VM Servers in a data center
- Not globally scalable
- On-premises was more prevalent
In 2011, further development takes place and the 2nd generation Cloud Management platforms appear, in which the emphasis is on security, high availability of the solution, microservices are being introduced, but basically it is still code with a monolithic architecture. In general, the improvements affected the following characteristics:
- Security
- Data Analytics
- Resiliency and high availability
- Introduction to microservices
- True multi-tenancy
- Continuous delivery
Starting from 2016, Cloud Management platforms of the 3rd generation appear on the market. There is a gradual introduction of containers and an intensive transition to microservices. The architecture of the code is no longer monolithic and this allows the cloud to shrink, expand and quickly recover regardless of the hosting environment. Cloud Gen 3 is cloud provider agnostic and can be deployed on AWS, Google, Microsoft, or any other work environment, including private data centers. Big Data with machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms can also be used extremely effectively. The main improvements include the following features:
- Machine Learning (ML)
- Artificial Intelligence (AI)
- Real time innovation
- Microservices
- serverless computing
- Cloud that is truly elastic
- Performance, Flexibility & Resilience
In general, the development of Cloud Networking can be represented as follows:
Currently, the rapid development of Cloud Networking technologies continues and the dates given above are rather arbitrary. The process of introducing innovations is carried out continuously, and imperceptibly to the end user. Extreme Networks' "ExtremeCloud IQ" is a state-of-the-art 3rd generation Cloud Management platform, with 4th generation Cloud elements already implemented and running. It is expected that these platforms will have a fully containerized architecture, dynamic licensing and sharding capabilities, as well as many other improvements that are still behind the scenes.
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Source: habr.com