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Introduction
In today’s bus iness environment, enterprise customers are under more pressure than ever
to innovate and adapt to new challenges and market conditions. Enterprises want to
focus their investments on their core business while reducing IT spending.
The cloud offers enterprise customers many benefits, such as lower costs and flexibility.
The cloud’s elastic model enables a company to increase and decrease infrastructure
capacity on demand. The usage-based model offered by the cloud helps governments
and enterprises reduce costs while increasing business agility by moving applications to
the cloud and consuming infrastructure resources from the cloud. This leads to enter-
prises looking at consuming network and IT services from the cloud rather than investing
in in-house operations.
The enabling technology in unlocking the cloud is virtualization. Virtualization abstracts
and isolates the computing hardware and underlying infrastructure into a logical
resource pool, allowing key capabilities such as resource sharing, virtual machine (VM)
isolation, and load balancing. These capabilities provide the fundamental building blocks
for an agile and scalable cloud environment with rapid provisioning, workload sharing,
and increased availability.
The surge in applications and IT service consumption moving to the cloud highlights the
need for evolved technologies and network elements in the cloud that offer security
and visibility to help businesses with performance and compliance verification. Evolved
networks and network services enable the provider to offer cloud services with security,
performance, and availability. The Cisco Cloud Services Router 1000V (CSR 1000V) is a
fully virtualized software router that offers a platform for enterprises to extend the data
center to the cloud and to enforce their policies in the cloud.
The Cisco CSR 1000V provides a transparent solution for extending IT services into
provider-hosted clouds. The solution offers a rich set of features, including VPN, fire-
wall, Network Address Translation (NAT), application visibility, and WAN optimization.
These functions allow enterprise and cloud providers to build highly secure, scalable,
and extensible cloud networks. In addition, the Cisco CSR 1000V supports a rich set of
application programming interfaces (API), providing robust integration into software-
defined networking (SDN) for automated provisioning of these networks and network
services and allowing simplified management and orchestration, which help in driving
down costs further.
Networks inherently carry vast amounts of information, including user locations, device
capabilities, topologies, and end-to-end performance characteristics. When exposed
appropriately through well-defined APIs, such information can be consumed by cloud
applications to fine-tune and customize their efficient delivery. The future holds the
promise of increasingly rich application–network interactions.
The primary objective of this book is to simplify design aspects and architectural details
in a unified resource, augmenting Cisco’s existing collection of installation and configura-
tion guides for various cloud-related products and solutions. This book covers the key