Hybrid cloud continues to be a strong trend. For many enterprises, their legacy data centre assets are going nowhere. Despite cajoling from cloud providers, the mix of cloud and on-prem remains a prudent one.

It is this theory which has seen the likes of VMware Cloud on AWS come to fruition. The two companies have successfully come together to provide customers with portability between private and public clouds.

Now, AWS is working with another such firm in the shape of Cisco. The latter has announced a new solution built for AWS to run production-grade Kubernetes applications on-premises, with the product being a combination of Amazon EKS (Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes) and Cisco’s Container Platform (CCP), all tied up with Cisco’s networking, security, management and monitoring and AWS’ cloud.

A blog post from Cisco outlined some of the more technical aspects of the partnership. “Through the single CCP management UI, the customer can provision clusters both on-premises and on EKS in the cloud,” wrote Reinhardt Quelle, principal architect. “CCP uses AWS [identity and access management] authentication to create the VPC, instructs EKS to create a new cluster, and then configures the worker nodes in that cluster.”

Kubernetes continues to be a key pawn in organisations’ maturing cloud strategies – and indeed, the strategies of cloud vendors. VMware acquired Heptio, a company set up by two original Kubernetes engineers to give the technology more enterprise reach, while IBM’s planned acquisition of Red Hat was described by this publication as a ‘match made in container heaven.’

“Today, most customers are forced to choose between developing applications on-premises or in the cloud. This can create a complex mix of environments, technologies, teams and vendors – but they shouldn’t have to make a choice,” said Kip Compton, SVP cloud platform and solutions at Cisco. “Now, developers can use existing investments to build new cloud-scale applications that fuel business innovation.

“This makes it easier to deploy and manage hybrid applications, no matter where they run,” Compton added. “This allows customers to get the best out of both cloud and their on-premises environments with a single solution.”

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.