Introducing the Cisco & Google Cloud Challenge

Modern cloud application development relies on microservice-based architectures that span both public and private clouds, and connect to on-premise applications. But fitting applications and microservices into both environments can feel like forcing a square peg into a round hole. Cloud developers need APIs that are agile and can work across public and private clouds with ease and consistency.

DevNet has the APIs

We started DevNet on the premise that infrastructure, including the network, would become programmable and have APIs. People didn’t know what to make of the concept of a programmable infrastructure. But here we are, four years and over half a million DevNet community members later, and the consumption of infrastructure APIs continues to grow, and this provides new ways for applications to interact with infrastructure. By exposing network and infrastructure APIs, Cisco is making deployment and management of these hybrid cloud, microservice-based architectures reliable, secure and easy.

Building hybrid cloud solutions

When building hybrid cloud solutions, cloud developers need to use familiar tools from the public cloud like Kubernetes and REST APIs to interact with on-prem environments in similar ways. They want to combine the power of cloud developer tools with the enterprise applications that they’re already familiar with. Kubernetes and REST APIs are quickly becoming the industry standard when it comes to automating infrastructure.

In many ways, hybrid cloud applications are the next frontier for developers. There are so many innovation possibilities for the hybrid cloud infrastructure. To encourage developers to rethink how on-premises and cloud infrastructure interact, Cisco is partnering with Google to make developing applications for the hybrid cloud easy and secure. We’re excited to announce the Cisco & Google Cloud Challenge.

A Challenge (with prizes!) you don’t want to miss

Cisco is bringing our DevNet community together with Google’s Technology Partners by challenging them to reimagine how business is done and how IT is managed in a hybrid cloud environment. We’re challenging you to build game-changing hybrid cloud applications using the Cisco Container Platform with Google Cloud Platform services to win some pretty spectacular prizes.

To get you ready for this challenge, DevNet is offering workshops, office hours, and sandboxes using Cisco Container Platform with Google Cloud services. Learn how a hybrid deployment can address data sovereignty concerns, such as GDPR compliance in Europe versus data regulations in China. Cisco Container Platform can manage the data on-prem while Google Cloud Platform can analyze the data regardless of location. Learn how you can connect cloud data from a private cloud to the Google Cloud Platform or even data from edge devices to run analytics and employ machine learning. For example, a factory may have data from sensors combined with location analytics from a Meraki cloud. By analyzing the data from these sources in Google Cloud, you can build predictive models to prevent outage or breakdown costs, by predicting failures ahead of time.

Get hands-on in the DevNet Sandbox

Visit DevNet to get started and register for the challenge. You can get hands-on with the Cisco Container Platform in the DevNet Sandbox, and start planning your project. We will start accepting submissions in September and will choose the winners in November. All submissions must use Cisco Container Platform and Google Cloud Platform, and we’re looking for the overall functionality of the product, user interface design and creativity.

Our judges will choose two grand prize winners and ten finalists and deliver prizes worth over $160,000 in total. The winners’ solutions will be promoted across both the Cisco and Google Cloud partner ecosystems and will be invited on stage with me at Cisco Live in Barcelona in January 2019.

Start creating and building right away.
Submission open September 1 to November 1

If you’re at Google Cloud NEXT this week, come join us on the show floor (booth #S1326) to get started with DevNet workshops and sandboxes. Otherwise, go to DevNet where you can register for the challenge at developer.cisco.com/googlechallenge. Start creating and building right away to submit between September 1 and November 1, 2018. We’re excited to see your ideas come to life as you invent the next wave of hybrid cloud applications with Cisco and Google Cloud technologies.