Intercloud Microservices with Docker and Nirmata

At Cisco Intercloud CTO Innovation Center, innovative vendors are selected to integrate and build cloud services for customer and market trials. We combine the world’s best ISVs with Cisco’s best to bring unique innovations to our customers.   At Cisco Live 2015 in San Diego, we launched one such solution – Intercloud Microservices with Docker, Nirmata, and the Cisco ONE Enterprise Suite.  The Intercloud Microservices solution enables a new breed of DevOps – where business get unprecedented agility at scale using cloud-native architectures, and unprecedented flexibility in choosing best-of-breed Cisco Intercloud providers across the globe.

The Intercloud Microservices solution enables full application portability across Cisco and partner clouds. As a DevOps team using the Intercloud, you can define an application blueprint and deploy it consistently across any public or private cloud in a fully automated manner. Rapid elasticity (dynamically scaling the application up or down) is provided via on-demand infrastructure and policy based management of application containers across the Intercloud.  Auto-recovery is built-in at the application container layer across Cisco and partner clouds.

Docker provides the container runtime and image formats. Packaging application components in Docker containers makes it fast to deploy, start, and stop application services and provides a layer of portability.

Microservices style architectures, where applications can be composed of several cooperating services, solve key development issues but introduce operational complexity.  This is where the Nirmata solution comes in. Nirmata provides an innovative cloud service that makes it easy to automate the entire DevOps lifecycle. Nirmata is designed for Microservices but can manage any containerized application. Nirmata’s policy based orchestration provides enterprise and Intercloud DevOps teams with the required separation of concerns, and end-to-end automation without loss of visibility and control.

Both Docker and Nirmata have just been named Gartner Cool Vendor 2015, for their unique and innovative solutions.

The solution also integrates with the Cisco ONE Private Cloud suite components like ACI, UCS Director, and Intercloud Fabric.  This allows administrators complete choice of resources for each application, environment or service.

Let’s look at how the Intercloud Microservices works.  The Cisco UCS Director integration allows administrators to build workflows that provision compute, network, and storage resources, and then expose them in end user catalogs. DevOps teams can then select the allowed IaaS workflows in Nirmata to provision Virtual or Physical machines. Nirmata leverages UCS-D REST APIs for the catalog discovery and to invoke workflows.

DevOps teams can then model blueprints for their Microservcies and can deploy them in one or more environments. At runtime each application service is deployed in a Docker container. These applications can be deployed to any public or private cloud without requiring any modifications.

This solution provides unprecedented agility, while maintaining the necessary security and control. IT administrators can set granular policies that determine on a per-service, environment, or team basis which cloud resources are consumed. This flexibility, and secure automation, can provide significant benefits and cost savings.

Here is a video demonstration of this solution:

Cisco Cloud Microservices Video

You can try this out the solution at: http://try.nirmata.io