Over past three years, Cisco and Google have been working on delivering product integrations across our portfolios. One of the most exciting areas of the co-innovation is around hybrid cloud and application modernization. Last year, at Google Cloud NEXT, we unveiled the expansion of our multicloud engineering effort to include Google Cloud’s Anthos, based on our industry-leading hyperconverged platform, Cisco HyperFlex. This January, we announced the availability of Anthos 1.2 with Cisco HyperFlex.
We are excited to announce our first jointly-engineered Cisco Validated Design (CVD) for Google Cloud’s Anthos on Cisco HyperFlex. This CVD provides a blueprint of design and deployment best practices for foundational elements of the hybrid cloud architecture that we announced last year. With it, our joint customers can empower their developers to reliably develop and deploy Kubernetes-native applications in production at scale, on Cisco HyperFlex, and monitor their performance using Cisco AppDynamics.
The CVD includes:
Enterprise-grade data services for stateful Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) On-Prem workloads
Cisco HyperFlex offers a Kubernetes spec-compliant Container Storage Interface (CSI), also known as the “HX-CSI” driver, that supports dynamic provisioning for persistent volumes via Kubernetes StorageClass. This CVD covers the details showcasing HX-CSI driver integration with Anthos that enables customers to run stateful applications requiring enterprise-grade data-services on their GKE On-prem environment the same way they do on GKE. This means IT Operations teams can better address the application data requirements while operationalizing Kubernetes, with assurance on deterministic storage performance, availability and scale as opposed to the inherent limitations and lack of Service Level Objective guarantees with other cloud provider plugins. They can additionally benefit from the features that HyperFlex Data Platform offers including compression, deduplication, I/O distribution, concurrent storage access etc. Equally importantly, these benefits uniformly apply in hybrid application environments where IT Operations teams have a mandate to operate VM-native workloads side-by-side with Kubernetes-native workloads.
Watch this video demonstration on how to deploy & consume HX-CSI driver in your GKE On-prem environment.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) for GKE workloads across On-prem and public cloud
The CVD also features the integration of Cisco AppDynamics with Anthos, providing visibility and monitoring for Kubernetes clusters and applications (microservices) deployed on GKE On-prem and on public cloud. This way, customers are able to monitor critical components of their applications, from Kubernetes up to every line of code or database query, all within the context of business transactions. This capability is key for customers who are running consumer-facing, production applications on Anthos. AppDynamics correlates Kubernetes-layer telemetry with application level metrics to significantly reduce mean time to resolution, resulting in operations and applications teams working better together and remediating bottlenecks faster. Additionally, AppDynamics offers an aggregated view of all services & sessions that together constitute a multi-factor, microservices based application; mapping the most trafficked paths and related service performance along the way. This functionality enables operations teams to visualize how their end-users interact with applications across devices, while identifying opportunities for optimization, thus serving the care-about of developers alike. To find more details, refer to How AppDynamics delivers unified performance visibility into Kubernetes & microservices.
Cisco Solution Support
Identifying and resolving issues while operating in multi-vendor hybrid cloud environments can get daunting. We believe complete solution level supportability is as foundational to customer success as the features delivered by the solution itself. Cisco Solution Support for Google Cloud’s Anthos on Cisco Hyperflex delivers collaborative support across all the products featured in this CVD, a result of the partnership between Cisco and Google Cloud support teams. This means a Cisco solution expert will be the primary point of contact if anything goes wrong, own the case from first call to resolution, and engage Google Anthos Support as needed. So, if an issue arises anywhere in the stack, customers can simply contact Cisco and get a fast & hassle-free resolution on complex issues. Find more details on Cisco Solution Support here.
Modernize and innovate with confidence
When it comes to modernizing applications or developing modern applications, a consistent hybrid cloud architecture can provide the best of both worlds i.e. pace of innovation with service choices for developers and flexibility with control for IT. However, the right data platform and performance monitoring for applications, can be the difference between low conversion rate due to application malfunctioning and sustaining brand loyalty for businesses with their end-users.
The Cisco Validated Design (CVD) for Google Cloud’s Anthos on Cisco HyperFlex eliminates that guesswork. This validated and supported solution can provide organizations with a risk-free path towards adopting and establishing a single control plane for consistent operational experience when deploying GKE Kubernetes-native applications across Google Cloud and Cisco HyperFlex, making it a perfect fit for DevOps agility and CI/CD. Similar to the vision powering the integration of our networking portfolio with Google Cloud and SD-WAN announcement, our mission with this CVD is to simplify cloud operations for our customers’ unique multicloud landscape and empower them to innovate with confidence.
Click here for more information on the broader Cisco-Google Cloud architecture:
- Announcing Cisco SD-WAN Cloud Hub with Google Cloud
- Cisco HyperFlex with Google Cloud’s Anthos At-a-Glance
- Google Cloud’s Anthos on Cisco HyperFlex – Tech Field Day CLUS 19
- Cisco Announces Kubeflow Starter Pack
- Google Cloud and Cisco: Joint Innovation to Solve Customer Problems
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