Cisco and Google Cloud announced a few days ago a partnership to deliver a hybrid cloud solution that targets to help customers maximize their investments across cloud and on-premises environments.

Hybrid cloud is nothing new; public cloud has been around for almost a decade, so it is important to try to cut through the marketing hype and see what this partnership brings to the table.

Highlights

  • New solution provides development and deployment tools so organizations can increase scale and improve agility and security in a hybrid world
  • Partnership extends Cisco’s multicloud portfolio and Google Cloud’s open, hybrid cloud technologies, including Kubernetes, Istio and Apigee
  • Complete solution will be sold and supported by Google Cloud, Cisco and Cisco’s global partner network

The Challenges

Cisco and Google cloud have realized that the vast majority of enterprises want to use private and public clouds together to enable their business. But managing a hybrid cloud environment can be costly and complex, and here is a list of challenges:

Challenge #1: As there are significant differences between public and private clouds, it is very hard to write applications that can move easily between these environments, let alone provide a consistent experience for developers. This becomes even more complex when an enterprise needs to work with multiple public clouds.

Challenge #2: Enterprises are realizing that some applications belong naturally in the private cloud, while some other to the public cloud, but some of these applications need to work together. Some applications need to extend across environments to take advantage of applications and services residing in other data centers and clouds.

Challenge #3: The cloud generally abstracts underlying hardware and resources, but these abstractions are different in various clouds. These differences can become a real hindrance for enterprises implementing hybrid cloud.

 

Cisco-Google Hybrid Cloud Solution

The joint Cisco-Google solution targets cloud speed and scale, with enterprise-class security.

 

Cisco and Google Cloud hybrid solution tools, capabilities and features:

  • Orchestration and Management – Policy-based Kubernetes orchestration and lifecycle management of resources, applications and services across hybrid environments
  • Networking – Extend network policy and configurations to multiple on-premises and cloud environments
  • Security – Extend Security policy and monitor applications behavior
  • Visibility and Control – Real-time network and application performance monitoring and automation
  • Cloud-ready Infrastructure – Hyperconverged platform supporting existing application and cloud-native Kubernetes environments
  • Service Management with Istio – Open-source solution provides a uniform way to connect, secure, manage and monitor microservices
  • API Management – Google’s Apigee enterprise-class API management enables legacy workloads running on premises to connect to the cloud through APIs
  • Developer Ready – Cisco’s DevNet Developer Center provides tools and resources for cloud and enterprise developers to code in hybrid environments
  • Support – Joint coordinated technical support for the solution

The solution will be available to a limited number of customers during the first part of 2018, with planned general availability later in the year.