Cisco To Help Cloud Customers Use Amazon Data Centres

Cisco has teamed with cloud and e-commerce giant Amazon to help businesses run cloud apps in either their own internal data centres, or facilities run by AWS.

Cisco claims that its new solution built for Amazon Web Services (AWS) makes running new containerised applications simple.

Cisco is seeking to move away from its reliance on selling networking hardware such as switches and routers, and instead develop its software offerings.

AWS deal

Cisco says that businesses are seeking the ability to develop and deploy applications anywhere they want. This could be across public and private clouds, but they don’t want to be constrained in any way.

“The Cisco Hybrid Solution for Kubernetes on AWS makes it easy for customers to run production-grade Kubernetes on-premises,” said Cisco.

It said this is achieved by configuring on-premises Kubernetes environments to be consistent with Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (Amazon EKS) and by combining Cisco’s networking, security, management and monitoring software with AWS’ cloud services.

Essentially the new solution will help developers reduce time-to-market, as containerised applications can now be deployed and managed more easily across on-premises and the AWS cloud.

Cisco’s enterprise support covers all parts of the solution.

“Today, most customers are forced to choose between developing applications on-premises or in the cloud. This can create a complex mix of environments, technologies, teams and vendors,” said Kip Compton, senior VP, Cloud Platform and Solutions at Cisco.

“But they shouldn’t have to make a choice,” he said. “Now, developers can use existing investments to build new cloud-scale applications that fuel business innovation. This makes it easier to deploy and manage hybrid applications, no matter where they run. This allows customers to get the best out of both cloud and their on-premises environments with a single solution.”

The Cisco Hybrid Solution for Kubernetes on AWS will be available in December and will be provided as both a software-only solution requiring only the Cisco Container Platform, or a hardware/software solution with the Cisco Container Platform running on Cisco HyperFlex.

Pricing for software-only subscriptions will start at approximately $65,000 per year for a typical entry-level configuration.

On AWS, customers pay $0.20 per hour for each Amazon EKS cluster that they create in addition to the AWS resources they create to run Kubernetes worker nodes.

“More customers run containers on AWS and Kubernetes on AWS than anywhere else,” said Terry Wise, Global VP of Channels & Alliances, AWS. “Our customers want solutions that are designed for the cloud and Cisco’s integration with Amazon EKS will make it easier for them to rapidly deploy and run containerized applications across both Cisco-based on-premises environments and the AWS cloud.”

It should be noted that this is not the deal that Cisco has done with cloud giants. It signed a similar deal for Google’s cloud offering last year.

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