Cisco announced a new managed container service running on its hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) that supports Kubernetes deployments in both on-premises data centers and across clouds along with new AppDynamics and Intersight capabilities.

Cisco’s HyperFlex Application Platform, an integrated, managed Kubernetes service, comes pre-installed on HyperFlex, which is Cisco’s HCI product. The platform curates open-source tooling and automates routine tasks, and it provides “a cloud-like Kubernetes-as-a-service experience with all of the controls and convenience of having it deployed on prem,” said Kaustubh Das, VP of product management at Cisco. It will be available to early access customers in the second quarter.

The platform is also “100% upstream Kubernetes compliant, and 100% percent compliant with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)," Das added. This means that developers can create Kubernetes-based applications in either of these two public clouds and then move it on premises without rewriting any code, or they can start on premises and then move into the cloud.

“This bridges the divide between developers and IT,” Das said. “Developers want to move fast, and they want open source. IT wants resiliency.”

The HyperFlex Application Platform also supports real-time monitoring and application optimization using new capabilities that Cisco announced today in its AppDynamics and Intersight products.

AppDynamics is the application performance monitoring platform that Cisco bought for $3.7 billion in 2017. Intersight is Cisco’s cloud-based infrastructure management tool.

The vendor today announced the AppDynamics Experience Journey Map, which will be available in the second quarter. It’s a customer experience tool that displays user experience journeys within mission-critical applications.

Das used a hotel-booking app as an example. A user launches the app, then arrives on a dashboard, performs a search, the search suggests hotels, and then the user books a hotel room. “Users take a number of different pathways though this application, and there may be hot spots within different pathways,” he said. For example, the application may perform slowly between the dashboard and search suggestions, or it may crash before it suggests hotels. And that may turn users off from using the app altogether.

“This maps the journey, correlates and highlights crucial issues, and identifies hot spots within that journey,” Das said. “The concept here is to discover the most crucial moments as a user interacts with an application.”

Cisco also added a workload cost and performance optimizer tool to Intersight. This is significant because previously Intersight only managed infrastructure. The new Intersight Workload Optimizer, which will be available during the second quarter, takes into account potential application performance, cost, and compliance issues across clouds and on-premises environments. It also proactively flags potential issues and alerts users to potential cost-savings opportunities. And finally, Cisco says it can pinpoint the root cause for application degradation whether it be at the application level, the virtual machine (VM) or container layer, or within the storage, compute, or network hardware.

“It’s the full-stack visibility from the infrastructure all the way to the applications,” said Liz Centoni, SVP and GM of Cisco’s Internet of Things Business Group.

And finally, Cisco also announced that AppDynamics and Intersight Workload Optimizer can now exchange and correlate data to give application and infrastructure teams a shared view of infrastructure dependencies that effect application performance, user experience, and business impact. The vendor says this direct coupling of application insight to infrastructure automation is an industry first.

“It’s a shared data set between two user personas — one is infrastructure operations, the other is the application operator — and it’s the same, correlated data set that they both see,” Centoni said. “So you have the full dependence map across the board. And that gives you, for the first time, the ability to pinpoint and root cause issues before it even hits the user experience.”