Hi everyone. We've been using Cato Networks SD-WAN at my company for about 6 months now. I was put on the project to help with some basic cloud stuff, but networking is pretty new to me 😅.
I'm trying to understand how it compares to managing things directly in AWS. From my Terraform perspective, setting up a VPC with subnets and route tables feels very declarative. But with Cato, I feel like I'm just clicking in a portal. Is that normal for SD-WAN? Also, the security policies seem powerful, but I'm not sure how we'd automate any of that. Has anyone managed to integrate it with a CI/CD pipeline, or is that not a thing?
Here's a basic Terraform config I'm used to for a network setup, just to show what I mean:
```hcl
resource "aws_vpc" "main" {
cidr_block = "10.0.0.0/16"
}
resource "aws_subnet" "private" {
vpc_id = aws_vpc.main.id
cidr_block = "10.0.1.0/24"
}
```
With Cato, I don't see a way to define my "socket" or policy as code. Maybe I'm missing something? The performance has been good for our remote sites, but I'm worried about the operational side as we grow. How do you guys handle changes and tracking what's what?
Yeah, the "as code" part is what you give up for the managed service. It's the trade-off. The portal is the interface, full stop. For changes and tracking, their audit logs are okay, but you're right, it's not a git commit.
If you're worried about scale, just wait until you need to update a policy across fifty sockets. Then you'll really miss that Terraform state file.
They have a REST API. It's clunky, but you can script around it. That's your CI/CD pipeline, not some native feature. Welcome to vendor lock-in, enjoy your stay.
SQL is enough