Enterprise customers vote with their feet, and both Cisco Systems Inc. and Amazon Web Services Inc. are following footsteps into the hybrid world.

This month’s announcement that Cisco would introduce a new hybrid deployment option for joint customers with AWS signified the continued importance that Kubernetes’ container orchestration technology has played in the information technology infrastructure. Cisco’s Hybrid Solution for Kubernetes on AWS is designed to optimize the deployment of applications across the Cisco-enabled on-premises environment or Amazon’s Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes, also known as EKS.

That Cisco chose to hitch its solution to Kubernetes on AWS reflected the power the open-source container orchestration tool now wields inside the enterprise, as customer adoption has propelled it to a significant position in the marketplace. It also confirmed Cisco’s firm opinion that customers want a bridge between on-premises and cloud.

“What they ultimately want to do is make the infrastructure on-prem look a bit more like the public cloud,” said Fabio Gori (pictured), senior director of cloud solution marketing at Cisco. “It’s got to be so you can take the best innovation of the public cloud, Kubernetes first, to on-prem rather than the other way around. That’s our north star, that’s our belief.”

Gori spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at theCUBE’s studio in Palo Alto, California. They discussed how Cisco will use container technology to close the gap between enterprise infrastructure and application deployment, the growing importance of automation in systems administration, facilitating transparency throughout the network, and relationships with other major cloud providers.

This week, theCUBE features Fabio Gori as its Guest of the Week.

Developer sites and competition

Cisco has already launched a developer site with learning labs and DevOps modules to facilitate use of the hybrid Kubernetes solution. As part of its approach, Cisco has more tightly integrated its Container Platform with AWS services to make life easier for system administrators.

IT managers will be able to sync on-prem and EKS deployment configurations to facilitate movement of applications between the two environments.

“This is about transforming new container orchestration technology that sounded esoteric until a few months ago into a cornerstone of innovation,” Gori said. “This is a big first step into closing that gap between the infrastructure and the applications.”

This month’s partnership between Cisco and AWS writes another chapter in an escalating competition between major players in the enterprise cloud computing space, with Kubernetes at the center. The pace of competitive activity has picked up noticeably in the second half of this year.

Last week, Red Hat Inc. moved application deployment environments in Kubernetes closer to its OpenStack cloud framework. The OpenStack 14 release is designed to ease automation for Kubernetes deployments on bare-metal and virtual servers, and it followed a $34 billion buyout of Red Hat by IBM Corp.

Not to be outdone, VMware Inc. recently announced the acquisition of Heptio Inc., a firm founded by two engineers who helped develop Kubernetes at Google. Heptio provides professional services for companies who are interested in adopting or are already using Kubernetes, and the new acquisition will become part of VMware’s Pivotal PKS container services platform.

Key role for automation

One of the key elements driving heightened enterprise interest in adopting Kubernetes for the IT infrastructure is automation. “Instead of going classical command-line interface, you’re thinking in a more automated fashion because you have to get fast,” Gori explained. “You have to adopt more automation into your strategy. What we’re doing is fundamentally helping customers make this transformation.”

While automation is playing a central role in the enterprise DevOps movement, there is also a premium on transparency and authentication. Both of these factors are dependent on maintaining consistent environments for an application’s lifecycle through deployment.

The Cisco Hybrid Solution for Kubernetes on AWS offers a single container platform user interface to provision clusters on-prem or in the cloud. Cisco uses AWS IAM, or Identity and Access Management, to facilitate the bridge between networks.

“Everything that you develop new in the cloud needs to ultimately connect back to the existing systems,” Gori said. “The idea is having a container platform that fundamentally gives you pretty much a transparent way of interacting with the other side. We have integrated identity and authentication in common, so you’re going to use the same set of keys on both sides, which of course is a developer’s dream.”

Ties to other cloud providers

How will Cisco’s recent deal with AWS affect current relationships with other major cloud providers, such as Microsoft Corp. and Google LLC? Cisco has been active in recent weeks with both.

Cisco recently partnered with Microsoft to enhance users’ Office 365 experience through its SD-WAN monitoring system. Google Cloud also announced that it was working closely with Cisco on a project to adopt Kubeflow Pipelines. The Kubeflow project is an offshoot of a Kubernetes-based initiative designed to offer packages of machine learning code and testing environments for developers.

“We’re customer-centric,” Gori said. “Customers want to use the clouds they want to use, and we’re there to help them. We will work with all the providers that our customers want to use.”

One of the appealing features of Kubernetes cluster management can be found in the availability of services for the container technology offered by public cloud providers. But the lack of services in private stacks has left enterprises to fend for themselves in finding viable ways to integrate Kubernetes applications.

Cisco’s partnership this month with AWS is a key first step toward solving that problem. “Closing that gap means fundamentally enabling customers to innovate and develop their new digital experience faster,” Gori said. “There’s a lot of competition in the marketplace, and we want to win the battle to close that gap.”

Here’s the entire video interview, one of many CUBE Conversations from SiliconANGLE and theCUBE:

Photo: SiliconANGLE