Delivering On the Open Hybrid Cloud Promise with Kubernetes

When it comes to multicloud, containers are one of the most compelling technologies to emerge over the past few years. Containers offer new potential by making it possible for applications to start faster and use less memory, provide a consistent development environment, and run anywhere. However, containerization creates challenges. Setting up, deploying, and managing multiple containers for multiple microservices gets tedious and is difficult to manage across multiple public and private clouds. Developers wind up doing much of this work, which prevents them from focusing on building differentiated applications and getting to market quickly. Ideally, IT would manage the container infrastructure, making its services and capabilities easily available for developers to consume.

This is where Kubernetes comes in. There are a number of cloud-native technologies that are foundational for developing applications, but the Kubernetes system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications has raised the bar. Kubernetes started out as an open source project by Google, but has become the standard when it comes to leveraging container technology to develop, deploy and manage applications in a multicloud world. According to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), it is now the world’s most popular container-orchestration platform.

At Cisco, we’ve been working to extend and optimize our container offerings to provide more choice and reduce complexity when it comes to configuring, deploying, securing, scaling, and managing containers in a hybrid environment. It was a no-brainer to add Kubernetes support to our offers. We also recognize that our customers are at different points in their journey with containers and may have different needs fulfilled by various solutions. Cisco solutions build upon a variety of container platforms including Docker, Red Hat OpenShift, and our own Cisco Container Platform (CCP) designed to help business move development workloads into real-world production environments. CCP utilizes 100 percent upstream Kubernetes and also leverages other open source components. It’s an integral part of our hybrid cloud offering with Google. And the Cisco Container Platform layers on top of infrastructure solutions like Cisco HyperFlex and Cisco ACI to deliver more holistic solutions for customers.

We’re in an era where continuous innovation and faster time to market compress application development and upgrade cycles. Developers love Kubernetes because they can containerize applications and then deploy them in an on-premises datacenter or in public or cloud environments. Kubernetes has a passionate open source community with thousands of contributors and is a primary project within CNFC. IT is on board with Kubernetes because it can help them transform from gatekeepers to innovators and can even scale to be the backbone for how they deliver IT across the entire organization.

As adoption of containers increases, organizations will go from running non-critical workloads in a single environment to pushing mission critical application services to multiple production environments. Many are looking to cloud-native application architectures and continuous delivery practices to reduce development cycles from months to hours.

We’re all about helping customers embrace multicloud by reducing complexity. And yet a multicloud environment can present some pretty tough challenges. Managing multiple open source solutions, hybrid environments, and addressing networking, security and storage issues can increase complexity for IT organizations that already have many technologies to support.

Kubernetes provides flexibility in running cloud-native applications on physical and virtual infrastructure and makes them portable across different computing environments. It’s proven in production environments so you can build new cloud-native applications, as well as containerize existing legacy applications and run them in in various deployment environments.

More to come. We’re excited about being on the leading edge of container technology solutions and look forward to bringing you more offerings that will help you innovate in a multicloud world.

Resources:

Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure

Cisco CloudCenter

Cisco Container Platform

Cisco and Google Cloud