Cisco Container Platform
Setting up, deploying, and managing multiple containers for multiple micro-sized services gets tedious—and difficult to manage across multiple public and private clouds. IT Ops has wound up doing much of this extra work, which makes it difficult for them to stay on top of the countless other tasks they’re already charged with performing. If containers are going to truly be useful at scale, we have to find a way to make them easier to manage.
The following are the requirements in managing container environments:
• The ability to easily manage multiple clusters
• Simple installation and maintenance
• Networking and security consistency
• Seamless application deployment, both on the premises and in public clouds
• Persistent storage
That’s where Cisco Container Platform (CCP) comes in, which is a fully curated, lightweight container management platform for production-grade environments, powered by Kubernetes, and delivered with Cisco enterprise-class support. It reduces the complexity of configuring, deploying, securing, scaling, and managing containers via automation, coupled with Cisco’s best practices for security and networking. CCP is built with an open architecture using open source components, so you’re not locked in to any single vendor. It works across both on-premises and public cloud environments. And because it’s optimized with Cisco HyperFlex, this preconfigured, integrated solution sets up in minutes.
The following are the benefits of CCP:
• Reduced risk: CCP is a full-stack solution built and tested on Cisco HyperFlex and ACI Networking, with Cisco providing automated updates and enterprise-class support for the entire stack. CCP is built to handle production workloads.
• Greater efficiency: CCP provides your IT Ops team with a turnkey, preconfigured solution that automates repetitive tasks and removes pressure on them to update people, processes, and skill sets in-house. It provides developers with flexibility and speed to be innovative and respond to market requirements more quickly.
• Remarkable flexibility: CCP gives you choices when it comes to deployment—from hyperconverged infrastructure to VMs and bare metal. Also, because it’s based on open source components, you’re free from vendor lock-in.
Figure 5-7 provides a holistic overview of CCP.
Figure 5-7 Holistic overview of CCP
Cisco Container Platform ushers all of the tangible benefits of container orchestration into the technology domain of the enterprise. Based on upstream Kubernetes, CCP presents a UI for self-service deployment and management of container clusters. These clusters consume private cloud resources based on established authentication profiles, which can be bound to existing RBAC models. The advantage to disparate organizational teams is the flexibility to consistently and efficiently deploy clusters into IaaS resources, a feat not easily accomplished and scaled when utilizing script-based frameworks. Teams can discriminately manage their cluster resources, including responding to conditions requiring a scale-out or scale-in event, without fear of disrupting another team’s assets. CCP boasts an innately open architecture composed of well-established open source components—a framework embraced by DevOps teams aiming their innovation toward cloud-neutral work streams.
CCP deploys easily into an existing infrastructure, whether it be of a virtual or bare-metal nature, to become the turnkey container management platform in the enterprise. CCP incorporates ubiquitous monitoring and policy-based security and provides essential services such as load balancing and logging. The platform can provide applications an extension into network management, application performance monitoring, analytics, and logging. CCP offers an API layer that is compatible with Google Cloud Platform and Google Kubernetes Engine, so transitioning applications potentially from the private cloud to the public cloud fits perfectly into orchestration schemes. The case could be made for containerized workloads residing in the private cloud on CCP to consume services brokered by Google Cloud Platform, and vice versa. For environments with a Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI), Contiv, a CCP component, will secure the containers in a logical policy-based context. Those environments with Cisco HyperFlex (HX) can leverage the inherent benefits provided by HX storage and provide persistent volumes to the containers in the form of FlexVolumes. CCP normalizes the operational experience of managing a Kubernetes environment by providing a curated production quality solution integrated with best-of-breed open source projects. Figure 5-8 illustrates the CCP feature set.
Figure 5-8 CCP feature set
The following are some CCP use cases:
• Simple GUI-driven menu system to deploy clusters: You don’t have to know the technical details of Kubernetes to deploy a cluster. Just fill in the questions, and CCP will do the work.
• The ability to deploy Kubernetes clusters in air-gapped sites: CCP tenant images contain all the necessary binaries and don’t need Internet access to function.
• Choice of networking solutions: Use Cisco’s ACI plug-in, an industry standard Calico network, or if scaling is your priority, choose Contiv with VPP. All work seamlessly with CCP.
• Automated monthly updates: Bug fixes, feature enhancements, and CVE remedies are pushed automatically every month—not only for Kubernetes, but also for the underlying operating system (OS).
• Built-in visibility and monitoring: CCP lets you see what’s going on inside clusters to stay on top of usage patterns and address potential problems before they negatively impact the business.
• Preconfigured persistent volume storage: Dynamic provisioning using HyperFlex storage as the default. No additional drivers need to be installed. Just set it and forget it.
• Deploy EKS clusters using CCP control plane: CCP allows you to use a single pane of glass for deploying on-premises and Amazon clusters, plus it leverages Amazon Authentication for both.
• Pre-integrated Istio: It’s ready to deploy and use without additional administration.