In an increasingly competitive environment, enterprises are under intense pressure to do more and to do it faster, with less. That's why the ability to rapidly deliver new experiences to customers and employees through applications is an important differentiator in a growing number of industries. Applications are truly becoming the lifeblood of business.

Public clouds provide developers with platforms for rapidly developing and deploying applications, yet most enterprises have their own data centers that house important workloads. That's why hybrid cloud is a requirement for most enterprises.

Containers and Kubernetes have emerged as key technologies to give developers more agility, portability, and speed - both in how applications are developed and in how they are deployed. But, enterprises have been struggling to realize the full potential of these technologies because of the complexity of managing containerized applications in a hybrid environment. Organizations need to work across siloed environments, technologies, teams, and vendors to glue all the parts of a hybrid infrastructure together themselves. Properly configuring Kubernetes to deploy applications on-premises and in the public cloud requires custom integrations that can be an operational challenge.

That's why Cisco is introducing a new solution built for Amazon Web Services (AWS) that makes running new containerized applications simple. The Cisco Hybrid Solution for Kubernetes on AWS enables customers to securely  deploy, connect, and monitor containerized applications in Kubernetes clusters consistently across private data centers and the AWS cloud. Customers can now get the best out both their cloud and on-premises environments with a single solution and enterprise-class support. The solution will be available in December 2018.

Cisco has been working to help customers manage this kind of complexity for some time. In the last year, we launched the Cisco Container Platform (CCP) and enabled Kubernetes support for other leading Cisco solutions including CloudCenter and AppDynamics. Now our collaboration with AWS brings together networking, security, management, monitoring, and identity into a consistent and secure environment across on-premises data centers and the AWS cloud.

The centerpiece of the new solution is the ability to provide AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) through the integration of the Cisco Container Platform with Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS). The unique connection between Cisco Container Platform and AWS's Identity and Access Management allows users to create and manage container clusters with common identity, authorization and access control policies across their on-premises and public cloud environments.

Cisco CloudCenter, CSR 1000v, Stealthwatch Cloud, and AppDynamics provide management, networking, security, and monitoring, while Cisco HyperFlex or Cisco UCS, Cisco ACI, and the Cisco Container Platform provide integrated hardware on-premises. You can learn more about the technical details behind this important integration in this blog post by Reinhardt Quelle, Principal Engineer and Cloud Architect here at Cisco and Muffadal Qwettawal, AWS Partner Solutions Architect at AWS.

This solution makes it possible for developers to deliver new applications faster. Developers now have the flexibility to develop in the cloud and deploy either in the AWS cloud or on-premises. The new solution also provides a production-grade environment for applications with enterprise-class support that meets the needs of IT. And it provides visibility and control across the hybrid environment without slowing innovation.

I'm excited about Cisco's collaboration with AWS. Together, we are helping customers accelerate the application deployment cycle, making it easy to innovate faster. The combination of Cisco's networking, security, management and monitoring software with AWS' world-class cloud services makes it possible for customers to focus on building and using applications, instead of being constrained by where they run.

Look for more from us in December when this solution becomes available.

More information:

• View the announcement
• Learn more about the solution on Cisco.com
• Find out about the Cisco & AWS collaboration
• Read the technical blog by Reinhardt Quelle and Muffadal Qwettawal
• Check out the Cisco DevNet AWS DevCenter