Containers will continue to make a big noise in 2018 – and Cisco has made its own push with the launch of its own container platform in collaboration with Google Cloud.

The move, which ‘simplifies and accelerates how application development and IT operations teams configure, deploy, and manage container clusters based on 100% upstream Kubernetes’, as the press materials put it, is being played as an extension of Cisco and Google Cloud’s hybrid cloud partnership, previously announced in October. Kubernetes, of course, was originally designed by Google before being donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

The list of certified Kubernetes platform and distribution partners is as long as one’s arm, including Alibaba Group, IBM and Microsoft among others. From Cisco’s perspective, its goal in releasing a Kubernetes-flavoured product is around networking, or more specifically, addressing ‘the end-to-end management of container clusters including setup, orchestration, authentication, monitoring, networking, load balancing and optimisation’.

The Cisco Container Platform will be available on software optimised with Cisco HyperFlex, available in April, and software supported on VM infrastructure, bare metal and public cloud, available in the summer.

“As the adoption of Kubernetes has exploded, container orchestration and management have become of paramount importance to customers because they enable application portability and consistency across on-premises and cloud-based environments,” said Eyal Manor, Google vice president of engineering in a statement.

“Cisco Container Platform is optimised in collaboration with Google Cloud to deliver a next-generation open hybrid cloud architecture, and represents an important milestone for our integrated Google and Cisco hybrid cloud solution coming later this year,” added Manor.

You can find out more about the Cisco Container Platform offering here.