Cisco and IBM are bolstering a joint product that taps the Kubernetes ecosystem to help organizations migrate their legacy applications into a modern, cloud native environment.

Kaustubh Das, vice president of product management at Cisco, explained that the update provides a common and secure developer experience across on-premises and public cloud environments. He said a growing number of Cisco customers have been asking for this help, and that Kubernetes is central to those plans.

“Kubernetes is front and center of the partnership as all of these changes are predicated by the massive developer adoption of Kubernetes,” Das said.

The update includes support for IBM Cloud Pak for Applications on Cisco’s HyperFlex and HyperFlex Edge hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI). The IBM product allows developers to build, test, and deploy applications for microservices across a hybrid cloud environment.

IBM is, in turn, adding support for Cisco ACI Software Defined Networking and AppDynamics Application Performance Monitoring tool with IBM Cloud Private.

Das explained in an email to SDxCentral that this was important for application modernization “as customers are modernizing their apps using Kubernetes and microservices they need a container-based set of developer tools including middleware that speeds up their adoption of modern architectures.” He singled out the robustness of IBM’s developer platforms and its WebSphere middleware stack as key components of this support.

“We simplify the customer journey for this adoption by having a pre-validated and integrated solution jointly developed by Cisco and IBM Cloud,” Das noted.

IBM is also now supporting Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) Virtual Pod (vPOD) running on IBM Cloud bare metal servers. Cisco’s vPOD consists of virtual spines and leafs and supports up to eight instances of ACI Virtual Edge.

Evaristus Mainsah, general manager for IBM’s Cloud Private Ecosystem, wrote in a blog post that these “elements are often deployed on VMware services on the IBM Cloud to support hybrid deployments from on-premises environments to the IBM Cloud.” He added that customers can also use IBM’s global cloud data center footprint and services like its Cloud Kubernetes Service.

Das noted that the deal builds on past work between the two firms that includes its Cisco Validated Design (CVD) for IBM Cloud Private on the Cisco VersaStack architecture. That architecture combines Cisco’s Unified Computing System (UCS) with IBM storage.

He also explained that compared with other cloud agreements, “this partnership goes further up the stack to support developers than other announced cloud partnerships."

The vendors are also working on a broader hybrid cloud architecture that taps into Cisco’s data center, networking, and analytics work; IBM’s hybrid cloud platform that uses open source tools like containers, Kubernetes, serverless, and enterprise software; and VMware’s open source software, services, and virtual and bare metal servers.

This architecture will use IBM’s Multicloud Manager as a base for managing multiple clusters in on-premises or edge environments; Cisco’s Virtual ACI to extend their network fabrics from on-premises to the IBM Cloud; and VMware’s ESXi hypervisor.

Mainsah explained that this will help reduce the complexity of running Kubernetes across on-premises and public cloud environments.

“This architecture delivers a common and secure Kubernetes experience across on-premises (including edge) and public cloud environments,” Das added.