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Google and Cisco have agreed to collaborate on offering tools and services to help enterprises develop, deploy and manage workloads in hybrid, public and private cloud environments.
The development and deployment tools will among other things allow developers to build applications in the public cloud and deploy it in a private cloud. The tools will also make it easier for them to extend and modernize on-premises applications on the cloud.
“Companies can now develop new applications in the cloud or on premises, consistently using the same developer tools, run time and production environment,” the companies said in a joint announcement Oct. 25.
Cisco and Google’s hybrid cloud offering combines technologies from both companies. Google’s core offerings include the company’s Kubernetes technology for policy-based container orchestration and its Apigee API for connecting enterprise apps to the cloud.
Cisco meanwhile is offering enterprises access to a range of tools from its DevNet Developer Center and to developer environments via its Cisco DevNet Sandbox. Google and Cisco will also offer a range of network management, security, performance monitoring, automation and technical support services under the collaborative agreement.
The two companies will use the open source Istio platform to help enterprises secure, monitor and manage microservices running in hybrid environments.
The ultimate goal is to give enterprises a consistent development, deployment and management environment for running workloads on-premises on Cisco’s Hyperflex Private Cloud Infrastructure and in the public cloud on Google’s Container Engine platform.
“This way, you can write once, deploy anywhere and avoid cloud lock-in, with your choice of management, software, hypervisor and operating system,” Nan Boden, head of global technology partners at Google Cloud wrote on a company blog. “We’ll also provide a cloud service broker to connect on-premises workloads to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) services for machine learning, scalable databases and data warehousing,” Boden said.
The new offering taps into the growing enterprise interest in leveraging cloud services for certain workloads while harnessing on-premise infrastructure for other workloads added Kip Compton, vice president of the cloud platform and solutions group at Cisco in a blog.
According to Gartner such a hybrid model can help companies optimize infrastructure costs and increase efficiency. The analyst firm expects that by 2020, 90 percent of all organizations worldwide maintain a hybrid cloud infrastructure.
Managing hybrid environments can however be costly and complex for a variety of reasons, Compton noted. For example, it can be hard for developers to write applications that can do equally well running on public cloud infrastructures or on-premises. Similarly, getting applications that run on-premises and those in a public cloud to work together can be extremely difficult.
The Google and Cisco partnership is designed to address such challenges, Compton noted. “We wanted to enable applications to take advantage of the best of the cloud and seamlessly integrate with existing IT assets on-premises,” he wrote in the blog.
The hybrid cloud offering from the two companies will make it easier for companies to build applications that will run smoothly across both private and public cloud infrastructures so organizations can harness the benefits of both as needed, Compton said.