Cisco and Google have announced the general availability of their hybrid cloud offering.
The announcement means that customers using Cisco’s software and infrastructure can harness Google Cloud public cloud tools from their on-premises data centres.
This will enable them to develop and deploy applications on their own hardware while using powerful public cloud tools at the same time.
VP of Engineering at Google Cloud, Eyal Manor, wrote in a blog on the announcement that “applications in the cloud can take advantage of on-premises capabilities including existing IT systems, and applications on-premises can take advantage of new cloud capabilities—without the need for a complete shift to the public cloud.”
Cisco and Google: Powered by Istio
A new container and microservice-optimised open source networking technology is included in the offering, this piece of the architecture is called Istio. Istio gives you the capability to set up policy-driven controls for connections between your on-premises network and your cloud based systems.
As earlier reported by Computer Business Review, Istio is an open source microservices management tool, designed to handle load balancing, flow control, routing and the essential security needs of businesses that use microservices.
It can handle service identity and security, policy enforcement and telemetry across apps running on multiple Kubernetes hosts.
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See also: Red Hat Contributes to Releases of Istio 1.0 – Already in Use by HP and eBay
A key component in Cisco’s hybrid system is control over your service mesh. A service mesh is a term referring to a network of microservices that construct applications and the lines of communication between them. As a service mesh grows it can become harder to keep track of and manage. Istio provides behavioural insights and operational control over your enterprises service mesh.
Eyal Manor points out in the blog that the system uses Apigee software to bridge the gap between legacy systems and the cloud: “API management through Apigee enables legacy workloads running on-prem to connect to the cloud through APIs.”
“With Apigee, enterprises can expose legacy, on prem services as secure APIs to developers who can then easily incorporate these services into their modern application.”
Google and Cisco have already trialled the system with the help of early adopters and testers, one such company is Telindus S.A who offer a wide range of ICT services.
Dr. Thomas Scherer, Chief Architect at Telindus S.A said: “The Cisco Hybrid Cloud Platform for Google Cloud provides a turnkey solution for a cloud-native, on-premises experience, and can be easily scaled to the public cloud, leveraging services such as Google Kubernetes Engine and BigQuery.”
