Deploying Consistent, Production-Grade Kubernetes Anywhere
Few open source projects have been as widely and rapidly adopted as Kubernetes (K8s), the de facto container orchestration platform. With Kubernetes, development teams can deploy, manage, and scale their containerized applications with ease, making innovations more accessible to their continuous delivery pipelines. However, Kubernetes comes with operational challenges, because it requires time and technical expertise to install and configure. Multiple open source packages need to be combined on top of a heterogeneous infrastructure, across on-premises data centers, edge locations, and, of course, public clouds. Installing Kubernetes and the different software components required, creating clusters, configuring storage, networking, and security, optimizing for AI/ML, and other manual tasks can slow down the pace of development and can result in teams spending hours debugging. In addition, maintaining all these moving parts (for example, upgrading, updating, and patching critical security bugs) require ongoing significant human capital investment.
The solution? Cisco Intersight Kubernetes Service (IKS), a turnkey SaaS solution for managing consistent, production-grade Kubernetes anywhere.
How It Works
Cisco Intersight Kubernetes Service (IKS) is a fully curated, lightweight container management platform for delivering multicloud, production-grade, upstream Kubernetes. Part of the modular SaaS Cisco Intersight offerings (with an air-gapped on-premises option also available), IKS simplifies the process of provisioning, securing, scaling, and managing virtualized or bare-metal Kubernetes clusters by providing end-to-end automation, including the integration of networking, load balancers, native dashboards, and storage provider interfaces. It also works with all the popular public cloud–managed K8s offerings, integrating with common identity access with AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and Google Cloud Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). IKS is ideal for AI/ML development and data scientists looking for delivering GPU-enabled clusters, and Kubeflow support with a few clicks. It also offers enhanced availability features, such as multimaster (tenant) and self-healing (operator model).
IKS is easy to install in minutes and can be deployed on top of VMware ESXi hypervisors, Cisco HyperFlex Application Platform (HXAP) hypervisors, and/or directly on Cisco HyperFlex Application Platform bare-metal servers, enabling significant savings and efficiency without the need of virtualization. In addition, with HXAP leveraging container-native virtualization capabilities, you can run virtual machines (VMs), VM-based containers, and bare-metal containers on the same platform! Cisco Intersight also offers native integrations with Cisco HyperFlex (HX) for enterprise-class storage capabilities (for example, persistent volume claims and public cloud-like object storage) and Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI) for networking, in addition to the industry- standard Container Storage Interface and Container Network Interface (for example, Calico).
Intersight Kubernetes Service integrates seamlessly with the other Cisco Intersight SaaS offerings to deliver a powerful, comprehensive cloud operations platform to easily and quickly deploy, optimize, and lifecycle-manage end-to-end infrastructure, workloads, and applications. Figure 5-14 illustrates the benefits of IKS.
Figure 5-14 Benefits of IKS