Containers are an important technology for customers in their efforts to accelerate application innovation. At Cisco, we've been working across our ecosystem to offer solutions to help our customers deploy and manage container infrastructure and applications across on-premises and our partner's clouds.

I'm pleased to share progress on our collaboration with Microsoft to make it easier for customers to rapidly - and at scale - deploy and run containerized applications across both Cisco-based on-premises environments and Microsoft Azure.

Today, I am happy to announce the addition of Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) to the Kubernetes managed services that natively integrate with the Cisco Container Platform. This integration means that customers can now further simplify deploying and managing Kubernetes clusters on-premises and in AKS with one tool, using common identity and control policies, reducing manual tasks and ultimately time-to-market for their application environments.

With the integration of Microsoft AKS and the Cisco Container Platform customers can now further simplify deploying and managing Kubernetes clusters on-premises and in AKS with one tool, using common identity and control policies, reducing manual tasks and ultimately time-to-market for their application environments.

In future phases, the Cisco Container Platform will integrate functionality to support Microsoft Windows container applications with the potential to leverage virtual-kubelet or Windows node pools in Azure. In addition, we will support Azure Active Directory common identity integration for both on-prem and AKS clusters so customers and applications experience a single, consistent environment across hybrid cloud.

Both Microsoft and Cisco customers are adopting Kubernetes to accelerate their DevOps plans, removing infrastructure constraints of traditional application stacks and unleashing innovation anywhere, from on-prem to the edge, to the cloud. As customers choose to deploy Kubernetes and hybrid strategies, both Cisco and Microsoft are excited about the expansion of our growing collaboration to deliver this new integration.

Cisco is committed to helping customers maximize the value of containers to enable them to do more with their existing and new applications, using the best of what Microsoft Windows and Azure have to offer, with Cisco enterprise-class consistency and security built-in.

It's exciting to see another milestone in our journey to develop solutions that help our customers innovate. You'll continue seeing us work with our partners to offer choice across on-premises and public clouds.

Stay tuned for more!