Juniper is making its virtual router and virtual security appliance available in Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace, a possible indication of how equipment vendors will coexist with cloud providers.
The vMX and vSRX virtual devices are now available in AWS as Amazon Machine Instances (AMIs), Juniper Executive Vice President Jonathan Davidson wrote on the company’s blog yesterday.
The virtual appliances are meant to behave like their physical counterparts — MX routers and SRX security devices — so this would give AWS customers an easy way to try out Juniper’s gear.
More importantly, it gives Juniper’s customer base a way to extend their networks into AWS. The vSRX, in particular, means that security policies could extend from the on-premises network into the enterprise‘s AWS presence.
The popularity of the public cloud and the dominance of AWS are forcing vendors to make some changes. VMware, which had hoped to become an AWS rival, recently announced a partnership with the cloud provider.
And as network equipment increasingly becomes a software play, vendors might have to start considering AWS as a sort of distributor — which is what Juniper has done.
Separately, the industry is expecting the hybrid cloud to become a norm, and that’s led to interest in making the enterprise network and the public cloud work in concert. Juniper is aiding that effort by putting its gear into AWS.
Microsoft is working from the opposite direction, making the Azure cloud stack available in on-premises form. The resulting Azure Stack product will be sold in the form of prefab appliances starting in mid-2017.