Cisco has launched the Cloud-Native SD-WAN (CN-WAN) project to improve SD-WAN and Kubernetes integration. CN-WAN is a reference open-source implementation that illustrates how SD-WAN solutions, such as Cisco Viptela SD-WAN, can integrate with the Kubernetes ecosystem to become aware of the needs of Cloud-Native applications.

CN-WAN maps Kubernetes application attributes to SD-WAN network capabilities to automatically optimize the application performance over the WAN.

As explained in a blog post, CN-WAN comprises a set of components (a Kubernetes Operator, a Reader, and an Adaptor) that can automate the process of optimizing the SD-WAN for each externally exposed microservice and help NetOps and DevOps teams to achieve their common goal of providing a better application experience.

The CN-WAN Operator runs in the Kubernetes cluster, actively monitoring the deployed services. DevOps teams can use standard Kubernetes annotations on the services to define WAN-specific metadata, such as the Traffic Profile of the application.

The CN-WAN Reader, on the SD-WAN side, connects to the Service Registry to learn about how Kubernetes is exposing the services and the associated WAN metadata extracted by the CN-WAN operator.

The CN-WAN Adaptor, also on the SD-WAN side, maps the service-associated metadata into the detailed SD-WAN policies programmed by the NetOps in the SD-WAN controller.

Thanks to the Cloud-Native SD-WAN project, SD-WAN solutions such as Cisco Viptela SD-WAN can integrate with the Kubernetes ecosystem to automatically optimize application performance based on Kubernetes’ application attributes.