Cisco, Google Partner on Hybrid Cloud
Cisco Systems and Google on Wednesday unveiled a strategic partnership to make it easier for companies to deploy and use hybrid cloud environments that mix public cloud services with on-premises data centers.
Under the deal, the companies say they will provide an open hybrid cloud offering that enables applications and services to be deployed, managed and secured across on-premises environments and the Google Cloud Platform. The two companies have spent much of the past year developing software and working with enterprise customers on requirements, Diane Greene, the CEO of Google Cloud, tells The Wall Street Journal.
Businesses will be able to use the combined solution from the companies to run, secure and monitor workloads in the cloud. The goal is to let them optimize existing investments, plan cloud migrations at their own pace and avoid being locked in to working with specific vendors, since the solution uses open source tools. Companies can now develop new applications in the cloud or on-premises, and use the same developer tools, run time and production environments.
The gist of the Google Cloud and Cisco deal revolves around better connecting the networking giant's infrastructure with Google's services. Kubernetes, Istio and Apigee serve as the glue in the Cisco-Google effort.
Kip Compton, vice president of Cisco's cloud platform and solutions group, says in a company blog post that Cisco and Google wanted to enable apps to take advantage of the best of the cloud and also seamlessly integrate with existing IT assets on-premises. “We wanted to ultimately offer a consistent environment on-premises and in the cloud so developers could develop wherever they want, and deploy wherever they want,” he says. “We wanted to do it in a modern way that would enable continuous rapid innovation. The result is a solution that will deliver cloud agility and scale, coupled with enterprise-class security and support.”
The solution will be available to a limited number of customers during the first part of 2018, Cisco says, with general availability coming later in the year.
