News

Cisco Partners with AWS for Hybrid Kubernetes Service

• By David Ramel
• 11/14/2018

Networking giant Cisco is teaming up with Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) for a new hybrid solution for managing containers with the open source Kubernetes orchestration platform.

Cisco last week announced the Cisco Hybrid Solution for Kubernetes on AWS, made possible with the integration of Cisco and AWS services with Kubernetes, the leading open source technology for managing containers.

Specifically, the integration effort ties in the Cisco Container Platform (CPP) with the Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS).

The solution is described as hybrid because it allows enterprises to provision Kubernetes clusters on-premises or in the cloud. On-premises Kubernetes environments can be configured to be consistent with EKS -- and use AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) -- while at the same time leveraging Cisco's networking, security, management and monitoring software.

Cisco said the solution aims to reduce the complexity of managing containerized applications in hybrid environments, which requires enterprises to work across siloed environments, technologies, teams and vendors in order to integrate all the parts of a hybrid infrastructure together themselves. By taking care of such "plumbing," the solution can enable business users to focus on developing applications rather than infrastructure concerns, Cisco said.

"This solution makes it possible for developers to deliver new applications faster," Cisco exec Kip Compton said in a blog post. "Developers now have the flexibility to develop in the cloud and deploy either in the AWS cloud or on-premises. The new solution also provides a production-grade environment for applications with enterprise-class support that meets the needs of IT. And it provides visibility and control across the hybrid environment without slowing innovation."

More information on the partnership was also provided in another blog post, where Cisco explained the solution will allow the launching of Kubernetes environments to the AWS cloud and on-premises environments through the same CCP UI.

"They simply declare their Kubernetes cluster specification and reference the cisco managed operating system images for the worker node images to deploy clusters in either environment," Cisco said. "AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) is integrated as common authentication mechanism, so that the cluster administrator is free to apply the same role-based access control (RBAC) policies across both environments."

Cisco Hybrid Solution for Kubernetes on AWS will be available next month.