Cisco and Docker continue to expand their partnership to make it easier for enterprise customers to realize the benefits of containers. Today we announced a new application modernization program with Docker and new Cisco advanced services.

This week Cisco is at DockerCon in Austin, as we continue to build on the strategic alliance with Docker we announced last month. Our engineering teams have been working together for many months, and in theannouncement blogwe explained the first solutions Cisco, Docker and our partners are delivering together. Now the marketing, sales and services dimensions of our relationship are kicking into high gear. Customers, partners and the marketplace are responding very positively to our alliance.

Three weeks ago Docker joined us for Cisco's Partner Connection Week and Data Center PSS events in Miami. We had the opportunity to explain our strategy and products to Cisco partners and specialists and to hear firsthand how enterprises are adopting containers. Many IT organizations, particularly in larger enterprises, are adopting containers to modernize their traditional applications, so they can realize the benefits and efficiencies of containerization.

Turnkey Acceleration for Customers to Containerize

One of the primary goals of the Cisco-Docker alliance is to make it easier, faster and safer for organizations to adopt containers. That's why Cisco announced today we are joining theDocker Modernize Traditional Apps(MTA) program. This turnkey program consists of consulting services and products that enable enterprise IT organizations to start reaping the benefits of app modernization in less than 30 days.

Today Cisco also announced the expansion of our Cisco Cloud Professional Services to include Container Networking. These services will help our customers bridge the skillset gap, so they can adopt containers easily in their environment and implement the best-practices that we have developed working with many other customers. They will include software and hardware as well as professional services.

You can read this blog for more details.

Providing the Right Ingredients

Cisco UCS is infrastructure as code (IaC). It is a fully programmable system with a unified API, so you can easily define the desired state of the infrastructure and what you want to do with it. That's why the Cisco Validated Design for Cisco UCS with Docker Enterprise Edition (EE) is ideally suited for DevOps. As DevOps.com noted in their article describing the alliance:

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.¹

Analyst firm IDC also noted the advantages of Cisco UCS with Docker EE in their recent report analyzing the alliance:

The Cisco UCS system is differentiated by its I/O capabilities, with an API-enabled system around I/O and virtual I/O devices. For the Docker collaboration, Cisco brings these I/O capabilities to containers through its UCS framework of virtual I/O devices, network isolation, policies, templates, and service profiles.²

We are also working with NetApp to include Docker Datacenter support on converged infrastructure. Last month we released a Cisco Validated Design for FlexPod with Docker Enterprise Edition, and we will continue to enhance this solution.

You can learn more about both CVDs in this Docker blog.

Making Container Adoption Easier

Containers are a very important emerging technology. Cisco, Docker and our ecosystem partners are committed to making it easier, safer and faster for you to adopt them in your environment. We are just getting started, so stay tuned for more to come in the near future.

For additional information on Cisco-Docker solutions:

• Go to the https://www.cisco.com/go/ucscontainers
• Read the Cisco-Docker Solutions at-a-glance document

* Sources:

1. "Cisco and Docker team to modernize cloud and data center application environments", DevOps.com, March 2, 2017
2. "Cisco and Docker Announce Strategic Alliance", IDC#lcUS41374617, March 15, 2017