Cisco Cloud Application Environment Released!

What a great leap forward for those forward-thinking Cisco development teams! Cisco IT has recently released a brand new Cloud Application Environment (CAE) for internal general availability. This is a remarkable platform-related accomplishment that drives our internal global cloud strategy forward while sharing the same benefits offered by our Cisco Container Platform.

The numbers speak for themselves – CAE is built to scale up to 3+ geo-availability zones, 9+ failure domains and 2,000+ applications, and 25,000+ containers!

What do both platforms have in common? They both run on Google Kubernetes: CCP does it directly and CAE does it by leveraging the RedHat Openshift container engine. CAE leverages the Kubernetes-based Openshift model because Cisco has traditionally relied on this technology as its main PaaS component, even before containers came into play.  As a result both platforms support open standards (no vendor lock-in), both facilitate development and deployment speed, and more importantly for the developer community, they allow infrastructure self-service and portability, which addresses the following unfortunately too common situation:

Your business team has developed a cool trendy application outside of your company, leveraging the latest and best web technology, frameworks and versions. Now the job is complete and guess what? The business team wants your IT department to deploy this new solution onto your private cloud environment. That sure can be an interesting headache! Your current platform offerings do not always provide the latest and shiniest infrastructure components, and we know that incorporating new platform features, or upgrading current versions, do not always align well with your Fast IT mentality.

No more headaches! Here comes CAE/CCP to the rescue! With this new technology, you can now locally encapsulate all your fancy infrastructure and application code into a container image, you can upload the application image to your internal image repository, then you can click a button to watch in awe how the container orchestrator unfolds and distributes your application into a number of production-ready, elegantly orchestrated containers.

Immediate astonishment! The application now runs flawlessly on top of your customized, unique infrastructure components. Extra amazement: Since your application now runs in containers, you can expect a new world of scalability, high availability, work load mobility and geo-distribution for your application. The cloud native paradigm is now closer than ever!