Cisco brings Kubernetes on-prem for HyperFlex customers

New Kubernetes-based container as-a-service platform announced at Cisco Live in Barcelona

Cisco has announced a “container-as-a-service” platform based on Kubernetes for its HyperFlex hyperconverged (HCI) environment.

The plug-and-play Kubernetes software package was announced alongside updates to Cisco’s management tools that help IT and dev teams maintain visibility across application domains.

HyperFlex Application Platform (HXAP) enables companies to deploy and manage Kubernetes on HyperFlex hardware, Cisco’s HCI offering that combines computing, networking and storage resources in a single system.

The software package comes pre-integrated with core Kubernetes components, while Cisco takes care of K8s lifecycle management and security updates and checks.

In addition to Kubernetes, HXAP is packed with native container networking, container storage, ingress and a load balancer, altogether creating “a complete platform for cloud-native application development.”

Liz Centoni, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco Cloud, Compute, and IoT, said HXAP is “is designed to take the hard work out of K8’s and make it as easy as deploying an appliance.”

Once this on-prem Kubernetes box is deployed, IT shops can then deliver a “Container-as-a-Service” experience to developers and simplify provisioning across the cloud, data centre, and edge.

The main idea here is to enable developers to perform cloud-native app wizardry in hybrid environments. According to Enterprise Strategy Research, the majority (70 percent) of organisations deploying or planning to deploy containers will want to do so across on-premises and the public cloud. HXAP also ensures “multi-cloud development consistency with 100% upstream Kubernetes compliance,” wrote Vijay Venugopal, senior director, product management, Cisco.

At Cisco Live, Cisco also unveiled new tools to help businesses gain a clearer picture of cloud and on-prem app performance and resolve application issues.

The new Cisco AppDynamics’s Experience Journey Map, “automatically displays the most important user experience journeys within mission-critical apps,” giving business and app teams a single view of business performance, user experience, and application performance.

Meanwhile, the Cisco AppDynamics Intersight Workload Optimizer can now swap and correlate data to give IT and dev teams a shared view of infrastructure dependencies that effect application performance and user experience.

“These new technologies provide full visibility and deep insights into all aspects of infrastructure through the lens of application, simplifying real-time correction and automated predictability to identify and fix issues before they even happen,” Centoni said.

“While some vendors provide visibility into apps or an individual tier of physical or virtual infrastructure, Cisco is the first to bridge all three with insight and proactive optimization up and down the stack,” she added.