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Google and Cisco today announced a new partnership around helping their customers build more efficient hybrid cloud solutions. Unsurprisingly, given Google\u2019s recent focus, this partnership centers around the Google-incubated\u00a0Kubernetes\u00a0container\u00a0orchestration tool, as well as the\u00a0Istio service mesh\u00a0for connecting and securing microservices across clouds.<\/p>\n
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\u201cGoogle\u00a0Cloud and\u00a0Cisco\u00a0are committed to meeting customers wherever they are in their journey to the cloud,\u201d said Diane Greene, the CEO of\u00a0Google\u00a0Cloud, in today\u2019s announcement. \u201cThis partnership enables developers and IT departments to seamlessly take advantage of the most open, secure tools for building modern applications in a hybrid environment.\u201d<\/p>\n
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As with so many partnership announcements, especially in the enterprise space, the companies remained pretty vague as to what exactly their combined solution will look like, but both Cisco and Google told me that the general idea here is to help bring the power of the cloud to their customers\u2019 on-premise environments.<\/p>\n
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Both teams stressed that a multi-cloud solution for enterprises must include support for the security, configuration and policy requirements of enterprises, as well as the ability to get real-time networking and performance data.<\/p>\n
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\u201cYou want to carry your networking and security capabilities with you,\u201d\u00a0Fabio Gori, the senior director for cloud solutions marketing at Cisco told me. \u201cYou want to be free to use microservices wherever they are \u2014 whether that\u2019s on-prem or in the cloud.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Google also noted that Apigee, the API management company it\u00a0acquired last year, will be the glue that will allow legacy workloads to connect to the more modern applications that developers will bring to this solution. Indeed, both Gori and Google Cloud\u2019s head of global technology partners Nan Boden told me that it\u2019s important for both companies to ensure that their solution supports legacy applications.<\/p>\n
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For Cisco, that meant optimizing Kubernetes for its data center tools and to allow its users to use its existing services in concert with this new solution. Teams from both companies already spent the last few months working on the tech behind this new partnership and the plan is to roll it out to a limited number of customers in the first part of next year, with general availability planned for the second half of 2018.<\/p>\n
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What\u2019s maybe more important than this partnership itself, though, is that we\u2019re clearly seeing Google\u2019s plan for Kubernetes in action here. The company has long struggled to make a dent in the enterprise cloud market. Partnering with large enterprise organizations like Cisco is one part of its strategy, but Kubernetes and containers play an even larger role, because they make it almost trivial to move workloads between clouds (assuming you data gravity isn\u2019t holding you back).<\/p>\n
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That\u2019s something Mirantis founder Boris Renski also noted\u00a0earlier this week. \u201cJust like Android was not mainly about Google\u2019s own mobile phone ambitions, Kubernetes is not about making GKE popular,\u201d\u00a0Renski wrote. \u201cKubernetes is about seeding the industry with open source standards for application development and operations that aim to disintermediate workloads from a specific IaaS provider.\u201d<\/p>\n