DEVOPSdigest

Cisco and Docker announced a strategic alliance for worldwide engineering, sales and support to deliver essential container capabilities for application-centric data center and cloud infrastructure.

Customers can modernize applications using Docker Enterprise Edition (EE) with Docker Datacenter, and deliver them securely and efficiently across Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) and Cisco validated Converged Infrastructure solutions with Cisco partners. Cisco and Docker will deliver unified and certified solutions for the entire application journey, whether organizations are containerizing traditional applications, refactoring applications to microservices, or creating new applications. Docker EE with Docker Datacenter running on Cisco UCS will provide application developers a seamless way to deploy, iterate, re-deploy, and monitor applications onto production infrastructure.

This worldwide initiative between two industry leaders will deliver:

- Reduced complexity for improved manageability and automation, leveraging the unified, highly scalable architecture of Cisco UCS, with consistent management across all computing environments - traditional and modern. Cisco UCS is ideal for distributed, microservices application architectures with high performance networking and comprehensive infrastructure controls via application programming interfaces.

- Scalable, resilient, secure networking for containerized applications using Contiv, a Cisco-initiated open source project that allows IT organizations to implement comprehensive network policy enforcement.

"The powerful combination of Cisco's leading UCS product line for Cloud infrastructure and Docker's containerized technology will offer customers high levels of security, manageability and scale," said Liz Centoni, SVP and GM, Cisco Computing Systems Product Group. "Developers and IT, working together, can now build, ship, and deploy container applications anywhere."

"Enterprises are increasingly looking to Docker to modernize their traditional applications so their investment in Linux and Windows Server applications can achieve major operational efficiencies while making these applications more agile, cloud-ready and more secure" said Ben Golub, CEO, Docker. "This strategic partnership brings even more opportunity for these enterprises by running Dockerized applications on a validated Cisco UCS infrastructure that is optimized for security, availability, performance and scale."

Docker EE is a leading container platform for enterprise developers and IT teams that are looking to converge a diverse set of application pipelines under one uniform packaging format, API & tooling for all their applications across the entire application lifecycle. Docker EE establishes the foundation for a Containers as a Service (CaaS) model that becomes the framework for an enterprise software supply chain where any applications (traditional and microservices) can be managed centrally and uniformly across any infrastructure.

Joint sales and support programs across Docker, Cisco and Cisco channel partners ensure that Docker EE works seamlessly for applications deployed across hybrid cloud, converged infrastructure, converged storage, hyperconverged infrastructure, and Cisco servers. Enterprise customers have the assurance of Cisco-supported Docker platform as part of this strategic relationship.

Cisco and Docker plan to deliver joint solutions, which will be available through Cisco's partner channels with full support:

- Contiv: Contiv is a Cisco-sponsored, completely open source networking fabric for heterogeneous Docker deployments across virtual machines, bare-metal, and public or private clouds. As the industry's most powerful container networking fabric, Contiv, with its Layer2, Layer3, overlay and ACI modes, natively integrates with Cisco infrastructure and complements Docker by directly mapping the application intent with the infrastructure capabilities using rich networking and security policies. At Cisco Live! Berlin 2017, Cisco announced the availability of Contiv 1.0. Cisco and Docker announced today that Contiv is now a Docker Certified plugin, through participation in the Docker Certification Program, a framework for partners to integrate and certify their technology to the Docker Enterprise Edition commercial platform. Contiv is available as a certified plugin in the Docker Store.

- Cisco Validated Design (CVD) for Docker Data Center on Cisco UCS: Customers can quickly deploy Docker Datacenter in a development or production environment on Cisco UCS B-Series blade servers or C-Series rack servers by leveraging a certified reference architecture and best practices for deployment. This solution is targeted at stateless container deployments and comes with entry and mid-range configurations; it is ideal for customers who want to jump start their container journey.

- Cisco Validated Design (CVD) for Docker Data Center on Converged Infrastructure: Cisco, a leader in the converged infrastructure market, brings its proven data center architecture to containerized deployments through its CVD "Flexpod with Docker Data Center for Container Management." This CVD delivers a highly available and scalable converged infrastructure solution including how to deploy and configure Docker Datacenter on FlexPod to utilize both virtual and bare-metal instances of Docker Universal Control Plane (UCP) nodes. The reference architecture also includes manual deployment and automated deployment processes for Cisco UCS and the Docker volume plugin for NetApp storage.

Cisco has a proven history of working with partners to develop solutions that deliver business value. The Cisco Unified Computing System (Cisco UCS) and Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI) are open infrastructure frameworks supported by broad, mature partner ecosystem. The alliance with Docker will extend benefits of Cisco's data center architectures to container environments, and the two companies will collaborate going forward to bring additional solutions to the marketplace.