Cisco Aims to Deliver Hybrid Solution for Google Cloud This Fall

Written by Jeffrey Schwartz
June 11, 2018

At Cisco Live, Cisco and Google outline a hybrid-cloud solution coming from a partnership announced last year.

(Pictured above: Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins and Google Cloud CEO Diane Greene on stage at Cisco Live in Orlando, Florida, June 11.)

World Wide Technology (WWT) has built a lab for testing Cisco’s forthcoming hybrid solution designed for Google Cloud Platform (GCP). WWT is the first early-access partner disclosed by Cisco and Google since the two companies announced their intent last fall to develop hybrid cloud solutions for GCP.

Deliverables based on last fall’s partnership, which aims to enable developers to build and transform applications that can run on premises and in GCP without modification, will result in the Cisco Hybrid Cloud Platform for Google Cloud, set for release by year’s end. Cisco and Google provided an update on their partnership, which could help partners deliver hybrid cloud applications and solutions to GCP.

“Our partnership created the opportunity to work with them to actually deliver the same experience for you on premises [and] in Google Cloud,” said Chuck Robbins, Cisco’s CEO, speaking during the opening keynote session for this week’s Cisco Live conference in Orlando, Florida.

Cisco will make the solution available for early access to about a dozen partners next month and hopes to have a launch event this October, Robbins said. The company will provide further details on the early-access program at next month’s Google Cloud Next conference in San Francisco. Diane Greene, CEO of Google Cloud, joined Robbins on stage during the keynote, where the two described the opportunity they envision from Cisco Hybrid Cloud Platform for Google Cloud.

“You can’t just rewrite your applications and move to a new environment,” Greene said. “What we’re doing is bringing you Kubernetes that you can start, using this modern development environment, and then you can let your application developers concentrate on what they’re doing — building applications.

Greene emphasized the widespread support for Kubernetes and argued it’s the fastest growing open source projects in the world. Though Google only contributed Kubernetes less than three years ago, the company has used it internally for a decade.

“Google launches 4 billion Kubernetes instances a week,” Greene said. “On that same infrastructure, you can run your Kubernetes-based applications, and you can run them both on premises in that same Kubernetes engine, and also … on Google Cloud on GKE [Google Kubernetes Engine]. You can easily do that and it’s completely seamless.”

In the WWT test lab is the Cisco HyerFlex multicloud, hyperconverged infrastructure platform. It also includes the Cisco Container Platform, which automates, updates and enables single-call support including for GKE and other Google components, according to WWT.

At the integration layer is Google’s Apigee, the company’s secure API gateway, which ties with Contiv, open-source networking software that enables container networks to be addressable from virtual machines and bare-metal networks.

WWT will make Cisco Hybrid Cloud Platform for Google Cloud in its lab available at the time of launch, said Jonathan King, vice president of data center and cloud strategy at WWT, speaking during a media briefing at Cisco Live.

“We will be able to do proof-of-concept architectures, test cases, performance benchmarking and then ultimately optimized integration [for] our customers so that they can get from their idea to outcome in the industry that they’re serving,” King said. “This lets us make it easier for customers to consume and deploy.”