Cisco, Google announce new open hybrid cloud partnership

Google has announced a new partnership with Cisco to deliver an open hybrid cloud solution that will help customers better develop and manage applications on-premises and on Google Cloud.

"Together, the companies will work on a complete solution to develop, run, secure and monitor workloads, enabling customers to optimise their existing investments, plan their cloud migration at their own pace and avoid lock-in," Nan Boden, Head of Global Technology Partners at Google Cloud, said in a blogpost on Wednesday.

"Developers will be able to create new applications in the cloud or on-premises consistently using the same tools, runtime and production environment."

The joint Cisco and Google Cloud hybrid solution will help developers to make the use of open source platforms, such as Kubernetes and Istio, GCP Service Catalog and service mesh monitoring.

Using these services, developers can discover available Google Cloud services, auto-authenticate from on-premises to Google Cloud services, future-proof existing on-premises applications to be cloud ready.

The Cisco-Google Cloud solution will also include a number of components (hardware, software and cloud services) that can be tailored to the needs of each customer, purchased together or separately, Boden said.

While Cisco software components will be licensed on an annual subscription basis including one-, three- and five-year terms, for Google Cloud services, developers will have to purchase them directly through Google or via authorised resellers.

The solution will be available to a limited number of customers during the first part of 2018, with planned general availability later in the year.