Cisco Systems Inc. is integrating the popular container software orchestration manager Kubernetes further into its software stack.

The networking giant today announced it’s adding Kubernetes support to two of its most important cloud tools, namely AppDynamics and Cisco CloudCenter. AppDynamics is Cisco’s cloud application performance monitoring tool, while CloudCenter is used to securely deploy and manage applications across private and public clouds and on-premises data centers.

Cisco said it decided to add Kubernetes support because its customers are increasingly looking to leverage the benefits of containers, which provide increased application flexibility by abstracting new software from the underlying hardware and operating system. Kubernetes is all but essential for most developers who use containers, since it makes deployment and maintenance easier and more efficient.

By supporting Kubernetes, Cisco is also making it easier for developers to deploy the orchestration software, the company said. “Organizations still struggle to efficiently and confidently utilize Kubernetes as they modernize legacy applications and develop new cloud-native applications,” said Kip Compton, vice president of Cisco’s Cloud Platform and Solutions Group. “With our latest Kubernetes support, customers can now easily adopt production Kubernetes across multicloud environments.”

The two Cisco products can work in tandem to provide further benefits for developers. For example, they can use CloudCenter to deploy their containerized apps and then enable constant monitoring of those app’s performance with AppDynamics the moment they’re up and running. “AppDynamics for Kubernetes can detect and report on dynamic conditions at the application or cluster level, then trigger CloudCenter to optimize performance for seamless user experience until abnormalities are resolved,” the company said.

CloudCenter will be a key element of an upcoming hybrid cloud offering it will release in partnership with Google Inc. later this year. Cisco revealed those plans last October, saying it would provide “a unique and open hybrid cloud offering that enables applications and services to be deployed, managed and secured across on-premises environments and Google Cloud Platform.”

A second aspect of that offering is the recently announced Cisco Container Platform, which is designed for managing container software applications across a range of information technology environments, including public and private clouds. By combining CloudCenter, the Cisco Container Platform and Google’s Kubernetes Engine, Cisco said, it will be possible to run “enterprise ready” containers on just about any kind of infrastructure, complete with all the benefits that come with its own software and services.

That Cisco is going all-in on containers shouldn’t come as a surprise. Lew Tucker, Cisco’s vice president and chief technology officer of cloud computing, hinted at these plans during an appearance last December on SiliconANGLE’s mobile video studio theCUBE during the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event in Austin, Texas.

In the interview, Tucker explained that Kubernetes and software containers are absolutely critical to today’s multicloud strategies, which see enterprises run workloads in a variety of public and private clouds depending on which one is best suited for their needs. He identified Kubernetes as the key to accelerating development in the cloud space thanks to its backup capabilities and open-source simplicity.

“When you’re developing an application, if you want it to be resilient, you want several instances of that application running, and you want traffic to be load-balanced across it,” Tucker said. “Kubernetes provides that level of orchestration.”

Cisco said CloudCenter 4.9 is available now, while AppDynamics for Kubernetes will be released on May 9.

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