Kubernetes takes center stage at Cisco Live during CEO keynote

ORLANDO, Fla.—Cisco Live kicked of this morning with bone-crunching beats and a light show before delving into topics such as Kubernetes.

Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins invited Google Cloud CEO Diane Green onto the stage to discuss the hybrid cloud partnership the two industry giants forged in October of last year that included Kubernetes.

Robbins cited the need to create more partnerships in order to push the development of networks and services, and he used Google Cloud as a primary example. The partnership allows customers to move and run applications between Cisco-powered data centers and the Google Cloud platform by using Kubernates and Istio.

"Whether you use their cloud for Kubernates or Cisco Kubernetes on prem you get the same experience," Robbins said of the partnership.

Green said it was important to "use disruptive technology but in a non-disruptive way" by writing applications once to run anywhere. Green said the Cisco/Google Cloud tie-up resulted in a 10x improvement in productivity using Kubernetes and Istio.

"We're bringing you Kubernetes containers and a new development platform that enables your application  developers to concentrate on building apps for customers by letting this Kubernetes container management take care of scaling and monitoring," Green said.

Green said that Google Cloud was a good fit for Cisco's container ambitions because it had used it internally for the past 10 years, including two years in open source. Google runs more than 4 billion Kubernetes instances a week on premise, in the cloud and in the Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE.)

Robbins started of his keynote by citing some of Cisco's accomplishment over the past 30 years and transitioned into thinking about the need to build networks differently going forward.

He said there were 2.1 billion machine-to-machine connections last year alone, but there needs to be better analytics of all of that machine-to-machine activity. With another 27 billion machine-to-machine connections over the next five years, analytics need to be processed at the point that has the most value in real time.

"We need to think differently about how we build networks in the future," he said. "The network has to play a significant role in powering this multi-cloud environment we all are living in."