News

Cisco Embraces Kubernetes in APM, Cloud Offerings

• By David Ramel
• 05/01/2018

Cisco today said it will add new support for the open source Kubernetes container orchestration platform in its offerings for application performance monitoring (APM) and cloud systems management.

Specifically, the company will support Kubernetes in its AppDynamics APM suite and its Cisco CloudCenter (formerly called CliQr). The latter is used to securely deploy and manage applications in multiple environments, including on-premises and private and public clouds.

Cisco CloudCenter 4.9 for Kubernetes is available now, while AppDynamics for Kubernetes will be available by May 9.

The company's embrace of the open source Kubernetes technology adds to its current container support for other platforms, such as Docker.

"Kubernetes is clearly becoming the orchestration engine of choice, with 50 percent of the Fortune 100 adopting it and many vendors choosing to build their own solutions around or on top of it," Matt Chotin, Sr. Director of Developer Initiatives at AppDynamics, told Virtualization and Cloud Review.

Chotin said the offerings target both developers and IT pros, but work best in environments where those camps are teamed up.

"We have found that container adoption is most successful by teams that embrace a DevOps philosophy, where developers and ops and working together," he said. "Cisco CloudCenter 4.9 and AppDynamics for Kubernetes are exactly the kinds of tools that can help support this collaboration. By providing a common language that makes sense to both audiences, we allow teams to avoid the silos that tend to plague traditional IT."

Cisco's Kurt Milne also blogged about the new capability for managing production-grade Kubernetes, wherein he said, "Features that make Kubernetes production-grade include automated rollout and rollback, auto-scaling, and self-healing of containerized applications (among other things)"

Chotin said the decision to add support for Kubernetes was in part driven by customer feedback.

"We've consistently heard there are a ton of challenges for enterprises as they move their container usage from dev to production," he said. "Our goal with this release is to help them in that process so they can confidently get the benefits of containers in production and across multicloud environments."

The company said CiscoCloud Center 4.9 is a key element of the open, hybrid cloud offering in the works from a parnership with Google. The partnership, announced in October 2017 and planned for release later this year.

"Customers will be able to run production-grade containers on any infrastructure through the combination of Cisco CloudCenter 4.9, Cisco Container Platform, and the Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), part of the Google Cloud Platform (GCP)," the company said in a statement today.

In a blog post, Cisco's Kip Compton today noted that Cisco has been involved with the open source community for almost 20 years and is now 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," he said.

The company said Cisco CloudCenter and AppDynamics can be purchased as standalone subscription-based software offers, or bundled via the Cisco Multicloud Portfolio as Cloud Consume. Another option is to get them with Cisco HyperFlex through Cisco SmartPlay bundles.