Greetings from Cisco Live Barcelona! It’s great to be here, sharing and showcasing the big things Cisco and our partners are doing to help our customers embrace multicloud. We announced one of those big things earlier today. The Cisco Container Platform is a new Cisco software offer to simplify the management of application containers. We’ve had some really positive feedback from the press and analysts and excitement in the Cisco booth where we have been demonstrating the platform.
One of the things that makes this new solution so compelling is that it helps customers tap into the potential that containers offer. Containers start faster and use less memory than virtual machines. And they make it possible for developers to package applications so they can work in a consistent and predictable environment. Containers can run anywhere making development and deployment so much easier.
The Cisco Container Platform announced today is a turnkey solution for production-grade environments that is:
- Easy to acquire, deploy, and manage
- Open and extensible to other emerging open-source components, such as Istio
- Delivered with world-class advisory and support services by Cisco and our partners
The Cisco Container Platform will initially be released on, and optimized for Cisco HyperFlex 3.0, and can be licensed separately or as an integrated solution. It also includes Contiv for container networking which supports Cisco ACI integration.
The Cisco Container Platform represents the next milestone in bringing the Cisco and Google Cloud open, hybrid cloud solution (which was announced last October) to our customers. Cisco’s engineering teams have been working closely with the Google Cloud teams to extend and optimize the Kubernetes platform for on-premises production environments. The Cisco Container Platform is an integral part of the Cisco and Google Cloud solution.
Cisco’s partnership with Google Cloud brings unique value to customers interested in the Cisco Container platform because it provides:
- Direct Kubernetes updates and best practices from the open source community
- Enterprise-level support for Kubernetes
- Integration with solutions like Istio and Apigee
- Application portability across Google Cloud environments and to on-premises private cloud
- Native integration with upcoming Cisco and Google Cloud open hybrid cloud solution
The platform will give customers an on-premises Kubernetes environment that is completely consistent with Google Cloud’s Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). Customers can get started with the Cisco Container Platform today and then transition into the Cisco and Google Cloud solution, when it’s generally available later in 2018.
For more information:
- Read the Cisco Container Platform announcement
- Learn more at Cisco.com
What does Cisco Optimized even mean? Can I not run native Kubernetes or OpenShift or dozen of other distributions on Cisco hardware?
@Chris Caine, thanks for your feedback. The optimization is referring to Kubernetes clusters deployed with the Cisco Container Platform that are configured with plugins that integrate with Cisco infrastructure such as HX and ACI. This is not the case if you just deploy upstream Kubernetes. In addition, implementation of Kubernetes networking and storage are done more effectively on Cisco infrastructure using these drivers. More to come!