Setting a New Standard for Production-Grade Kubernetes

Some of you may be surprised to learn about Cisco’s involvement in the open source community. In fact, we’ve been working with open source technologies for close to 20 years. We are heavily invested. Our releases of Cisco CloudCenter 4.9 and AppDynamics for Kubernetes today are not only milestones in delivering on the open, hybrid cloud offering that we announced last year, but also illustrate our commitment to building on open source technologies like Kubernetes to help our customers adopt at scale, in production, on premises, and in cloud environments.

One big reason containers are such a big focus area for us is because they are changing the way our customers build and run applications. Customers are looking for ways to increase feature velocity and accelerate delivery of software applications. Kubernetes can make all the difference when it comes to quickly ramping applications to meet business and market demand. The flexibility to run cloud-native applications on physical and virtual infrastructure and making them portable across different compute environments can be a game changer. However, it can be hard to run production-grade Kubernetes. The deployment demands network management, persistent storage, load balancing and a host other requirements to support the applications.

This is where CloudCenter 4.9 and AppDynamics for Kubernetes are helping Cisco set a new standard for production-grade Kubernetes. CloudCenter helps customers deploy and manage applications in multicloud environments and now supports on premises and cloud Kubernetes as deployment environments. AppDynamics for Kubernetes provides visibility to containerized applications, Kubernetes clusters, and underlying infrastructure. The full stack monitoring and visibility solves one of the biggest challenges related to running Kubernetes at scale and in production. These solutions, the recently announced Cisco Container Platform, and infrastructure solution like Cisco Hyperflex and Cisco ACI are all optimized for Kubernetes. Together, they deliver what is arguably the industry’s best overall solution for running Kubernetes in a production environment.

Containers have become a really important technology for our customers as they build hybrid cloud strategies. Customers can deploy and manage the lifecycle of a Kubernetes cluster on premises with Cisco Container Platform which also automates linking to underlying infrastructure. CloudCenter and AppDynamics for Kubernetes also help customers then deploy, monitor and manage both traditional and cloud-native applications in datacenters or the cloud. This makes it possible to provide lifecycle management, policy-based governance and the optimization of the entire application, cluster, and underlying infrastructure services.

It is truly exciting to see our active role in expanding the development of open source options like this come to fruition as solutions that are helping our customers innovate in a multicloud world. I’m really proud of our team and the many teams at Cisco delivering on the promise of Kubernetes.

Are you using containers? What do you think about what we are doing? I’d love to hear from you.