Hey everyone, I'm pretty new to the networking side of cloud stuff, mostly focused on Terraform and AWS services. My team recently moved from Cisco Meraki to Cato Networks for our SD-WAN about six months ago. I was tasked with helping set up some integrations, so I wanted to share my beginner's perspective.
The biggest difference for me was how Cato handles policy. With Meraki, we were always configuring device-level settings. Cato is more about defining rules for applications and identities directly in their cloud portal. It felt more like working with a security group in AWS, which was familiar.
Here's a super basic example of the logic, like I'd see in their policy builder. It's not actual code, but this is how my brain maps it now:
```json
{
"source": "Branch Office A",
"destination": "AWS VPC",
"application": "Salesforce",
"action": "Allow with optimization"
}
```
The learning curve was steep for me 😅. But once it clicked, managing everything from one cloud console felt easier than our old Meraki dashboard sprawl. I'm still figuring out how this all connects to my IaC workflows though. Anyone else made a similar switch? Is it common to manage Cato configs via API/Terraform, or is the portal the main way?