Cisco Intersight Kubernetes Service
Cisco Intersight Kubernetes Service (IKS) effectively expands CCP’s functionality to benefit from Intersight’s native infrastructure management capabilities, further simplifying building and managing Kubernetes environments. IKS is a SaaS offering, taking away the hassle of installing, hosting, and managing a container management solution. For organizations with specific requirements, it also offers two additional deployment options (with a virtual appliance). So, let’s take a look at how IKS can make our lives easier. Figure 5-12 provides an overview of Intersight Cloud management.
Figure 5-12 Intersight Cloud management
Benefits of IKS
The following are the benefits of using IKS:
• Simplify Kubernetes Day 0 to Day N operations and increase application agility with a turnkey SaaS platform that makes it easy to deploy and manage clusters across data centers, the edge, and public clouds.
• Reduce risk, lower cost, improve governance, and take multicloud control on a security-hardened platform, with enhanced availability, native integrations with AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, and end-to-end industry-leading Cisco TAC support.
• Get more value from your investments with a flexible, extensible Kubernetes platform that supports multiple delivery options, hypervisors, storage, and bare-metal configurations.
• Automate and simplify with self-service built-in add-ons and optimizations such as AI/ML frameworks, service mesh, networking, monitoring, logging, and persistent object storage.
Common Use Case
A good example comes from the retail sector: an IT admin needs to quickly create and configure hundreds of edge locations for the company’s retail branches to perform AI/ML processing and a few core ones in privately owned or co-located data centers. The reason it makes sense for processing or storing large chunks of data at the edge is the cost of shipping the data back to the core DC or to a public cloud (and latency to a certain extent).
Creating those Kubernetes clusters would require firmware upgrades as well as OS and hypervisor installations before the IT admin can even get to the container layer. With Cisco Intersight providing a comprehensive, common orchestration and management layer—from server and fabric management to hyperconverged infrastructure management to Kubernetes—creating a container environment from scratch can be literally done with just a few clicks. Figure 5-13 illustrates a high-level architecture of IKS.
Figure 5-13 Architecture of IKS
IT admins can use either the IKS GUI or its APIs, or they can integrate with an Infrastructure as Code plan (such as HashiCorp’s Terraform) to quickly deploy a Kubernetes environment on a variety of platforms—VMware ESXi hypervisors or Cisco HyperFlex—thus enabling significant savings and efficiency without the need of virtualization.