Cisco and AWS work on joint hybrid cloud solution

Cisco and Amazon Web Services (AWS) are partnering to create a platform that makes it easier for enterprises to manage their on-premise and cloud-based software container environments.

In recent years, containers have become popular for deploying applications because of their flexibility. The technology combines workloads in a lightweight, portable package that can easily be moved between different types of infrastructure. Cisco unveiled the Hybrid Solution for Kubernetes on AWS, which aims to simplify the use of containers on a large scale.

CCP

The solution includes the Cisco Container Platform (CCP). This is a version of the Kubernetes framework, which is widely used to manage container environments. To create Hybrid Solutions for Kubernetes, Cisco integrated CCP with various other AWS software products and services.

The platform turns CCP into what the company describes as a single window to provide container clusters on on-premises infrastructure and the Kubernetes service on AWS. The Kubernetes service at AWS is called Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS). Administrators can synchronize the configurations of their on-premises and EKS deployments, allowing applications to move between the two without requiring major changes.

Fabio Gori, senior director of cloud solutions marketing at Cisco, talks about the first solution that truly integrates the two environments. Ultimately, this means that the development of applications goes faster, without the user having to worry about limitations during development and deployment. It gives developers freedom.

Integrations

The solution also has integrations with a few other AWS services. For example, administrators can use AWS Identity and Access Management to handle a set of access rules on various deployments, and manage related tasks such as user authentication. There is also a possibility to use Amazon Elastic Container Registry to store images of containers – pre-packaged versions of the most commonly used software components in an environment.

Companies can handle the other aspects of managing operations with Cisco software. For example, the Hybrid Solution works with the company’s AppDynamics application, Stealthwatch Cloud network security solution and CloudCenter. CloudCenter is a platform to manage multi-cloud environments.