Cisco Systems Inc. has joined with Amazon Web Services Inc. to build a platform aimed at making it easier for enterprises to manage their on-premise and cloud-based software container environments.

Containers have become a popular means of deploying applications over recent years thanks to their flexibility. The technology bundles workloads into a lightweight, portable package that can be easily moved between different types of infrastructure. The Cisco Hybrid Solution for Kubernetes on AWS, which was unveiled this morning, is aimed at taking the hassle out of using containers at large scale.

At the heart of the offering is the Cisco Container Platform. It’s the company’s beefed-up version of the open-source Kubernetes framework, the most widely used tool for managing container environments. To build Hybrid Solution for Kubernetes, Cisco has tightly integrated CCP with several of its other software products as well as services from AWS.

The platform turns CCP into what the company described a single pane of glass for provisioning container clusters across on-premises infrastructure and AWS’ hosted Kubernetes service. That latter service is known as the Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes, or EKS. Administrators can sync up their on-premises and EKS deployments’ configurations so that applications may be moved between them without requiring major changes.

“This is the first solution of its kind that really integrates these two environments,” Fabio Gori, senior director of cloud solutions marketing at Cisco, told SiliconANGLE. “Ultimately it means developing applications faster without having to worry about constraints in terms of where to develop and where to deploy. It really sets them free.”

“Cisco is the first solution to natively integrate into EKS,” noted Stu Miniman, senior analyst with SiliconANGLE sister market research firm Wikibon. “Other solutions just work with EC2. So it’s deeper integration, but I have to believe that lots of other partners will follow suit.”

The consistency Cisco’s pitching is facilitated by integrations with a pair of other AWS services. Administrators can use AWS Identity and Access Management service to enforce a unified set of access control rules across deployments, as well as manage related tasks such as user authentication. The second integration provides the ability to use Amazon Elastic Container Registry for storing container images, prepackaged versions of the most commonly used software components in an environment.

Companies can handle the other aspects of their management operations using software from Cisco. The Hybrid Solution for Kubernetes works with company’s AppDynamics application performance monitoring, the Stealthwatch Cloud network security solution and CloudCenter, a platform for managing multicloud environments.

Cisco argues that this one-stop-shop approach can save a lot of effort for enterprises. Kip Compton, the company’s senior vice president of Cloud Platform and Solutions, explained that “properly configuring Kubernetes to deploy applications on-premises and in the public cloud requires custom integrations that can be an operational challenge.” With the new solution, he wrote, “customers can now get the best out both their cloud and on-premises environments with a single solution and enterprise-class support.”

As Gori put it, “This is not about religion” of public cloud or on-premises. “It’s about using the best of both worlds and deploying whatever makes sense.”

The introduction of the Hybrid Solution for Kubernetes comes a year after Cisco announced plans to build a similar Kubernetes offering with Google LLC. That partnership has the same goal of enabling joint customers to build containerized applications spanning on- and off-premises infrastructure.

Gori spoke with SiliconANGLE co-Chief Executive John Furrier Thursday in the Palo Alto, California studio of theCUBE. Here’s the full interview:

Photo: Cisco