IOx applications run in a Linux container on the same hardware as the Cisco IOS-XE or IOS-IR network operating system, converting a Cisco IR1101 or IE3400 switch into a dual-function network device and edge compute node without additional hardware. Applications access network traffic via packet capture APIs, enabling on-device anomaly detection and Cisco Cyber Vision OT threat detection without traffic hairpinning to a remote server. Docker container support allows DevOps teams to build, test, and deploy IoT edge applications using standard toolchains and CI/CD pipelines familiar from cloud development. Field Network Director provides centralised application lifecycle management — deploy, start, stop, update — across thousands of IOx-capable devices from a single console. Applications share resources via defined CPU, memory, and storage quotas enforced by IOx hypervisor isolation.
IoT Product
Networks
Cisco
Cisco IOx is an application hosting environment running on Cisco industrial switches and routers that allows containerised Python, Docker, and native applications to run alongside network functions for edge IoT compute.