Applications are the lifeblood of business. Build them easily and get them up and running quickly and you have a huge competitive advantage. But get bogged down worrying about where those applications run, and you miss opportunities. Cisco is now solving that problem with a new solution built for Amazon Web Services (AWS) that makes running new containerized applications simple.

Organizations want the ability to develop and deploy applications anywhere they want. Across public and private clouds, without constraints. The Cisco Hybrid Solution for Kubernetes on AWS makes it easy for customers to run production-grade Kubernetes on-premises.  This is achieved by configuring on-premises Kubernetes environments to be consistent with Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (Amazon EKS) and by combining Cisco’s networking, security, management and monitoring software with AWS’ world-class cloud services. This enables customers to focus on building and using applications, instead of being constrained by where they run.

This new solution:

• Helps developers accelerate innovation and reduce time-to-market. Containerized applications can now be deployed and managed more easily across on-premises and the AWS cloud.
• Reduces complexity and costs for IT operations teams. The management of on-premises Kubernetes infrastructure is simplified with a common set of tools on-premises and on AWS.
• Meets the needs of both developers and IT operations teams.  It allows containerized applications to work with existing resources and production environments.
• Provides world-class support. Cisco’s enterprise support covers all parts of the solution.

“Today, most customers are forced to choose between developing applications on-premises or in the cloud. This can create a complex mix of environments, technologies, teams and vendors. But they shouldn’t have to make a choice,” said Kip Compton, senior vice president, Cloud Platform and Solutions at Cisco. “Now, developers can use existing investments to build new cloud-scale applications that fuel business innovation. This makes it easier to deploy and manage hybrid applications, no matter where they run. This allows customers to get the best out of both cloud and their on-premises environments with a single solution.”

“More customers run containers on AWS and Kubernetes on AWS than anywhere else,” said Terry Wise, Global Vice President of Channels & Alliances, Amazon Web Services, Inc. “Our customers want solutions that are designed for the cloud and Cisco’s integration with Amazon EKS will make it easier for them to rapidly deploy and run containerized applications across both Cisco-based on-premises environments and the AWS cloud.”

Availability, Pricing, and Support

The Cisco Hybrid Solution for Kubernetes on AWS will be available to customers in December 2018. It will be provided as both a software-only solution requiring only the Cisco Container Platform, or a hardware/software solution with the Cisco Container Platform running on Cisco HyperFlex™. The software is licensed in one-, three- and five-year subscriptions. Pricing for software-only subscriptions will start at approximately $65,000 per year for a typical entry-level configuration.  On AWS, customers pay $0.20 per hour for each Amazon EKS cluster that they create in addition to the AWS resources (e.g. Amazon EC2 instances or Amazon Elastic Block Store volumes) they create to run Kubernetes worker nodes.

The new solution will be sold by Cisco and its global partner network. The platform will be supported by Cisco’s world-class technical support. Cisco DevNet will also provide an online resource for developers to trial and benchmark hybrid cloud applications using the solution.