Cisco Container Platform – Kubernetes for the Enterprise

Developed by Google to shepherd their in-house container clusters, Kubernetes has been vying for the attention and adoption of cloud architects. For the past several years, Docker Swarm, Mesos and Kubernetes have engaged in the duel to bring orchestration nirvana to containerized applications. While there are other participants in the fray and while Mesos has had a longer showing, Kubernetes seems to be capturing the pole position according to this research. This assertion is reinforced by the recent addition of support for Kubernetes to Apache Mesos, to Pivotal Container Service and to Cloud Foundry. The most recent admission of market realities is Docker’s seamless integration of Kubernetes into their Enterprise Edition offering. Whichever container orchestrator eventually arises as the de facto standard, it is clear that enterprises are looking for more and more infrastructure abstraction so they can laser focus on core business objectives.

Cisco Container Platform ushers all of the tangible benefits of container orchestration into the technology domain of the enterprise. Based on upstream Kubernetes, Cisco Container Platform presents a UI for self-service deployment and management of container clusters. These clusters consume private cloud resources based on established authentication profiles, which can be bound to existing RBAC models. The advantage to disparate organizational teams is the flexibility to consistently and efficiently deploy clusters into IaaS resources, a feat not easily accomplished and scaled when utilizing script-based frameworks. Teams can discriminately manage their cluster resources, including responding to conditions requiring a scale out or scale in event, without fear of disrupting another team’s assets. Cisco Container Platform boasts an innately open architecture composed of well-established open source components – a framework embraced by DevOps teams aiming their innovation toward cloud-neutral work streams.

Cisco Container Platform deploys easily into an existing infrastructure, whether it be of a virtual or bare metal nature to become the turnkey container management platform in the enterprise. Cisco Container Platform incorporates ubiquitous monitoring and policy-based security and provides essential services such as load balancing an logging. The platform can provide applications an extension into network management, application performance monitoring, analytics and logging. Cisco Container Platform offers an API layer that is compatible with Google Cloud Platform and Google Kubernetes Engine, so transitioning applications potentially from the private cloud to the public cloud fits perfectly into orchestration schemes. The case could be made for containerized workloads residing in the private cloud on Cisco Container Platform to consume services brokered by Google Cloud Platform and vice versa. For environments with a Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI), Contiv, a Cisco Container Platform component, will secure the containers in a logical policy-based context. Those environments with Cisco HyperFlex (HX) can leverage the inherent benefits provided by HX storage and provide persistent volumes to the containers in the form of FlexVolumes. Cisco Container Platform normalizes the operational experience of managing a Kubernetes environment by providing a curated production quality solution integrated with best-of-breed open source projects.

Find out more about Cisco Container Platform at www.cisco.com/go/containers.

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