Dashify: Solving Data Wrangling for Dashboards

This post is about Dashify, the Cisco Observability Platform’s dashboarding framework. We are going to describe how AppDynamics, and partners, use Dashify to build custom product screens, and then we are going to dive into details of the framework itself. We will describe its specific features that make it the most powerful and flexible dashboard framework in the industry.

What are dashboards?

Dashboards are data-driven user interfaces that are designed to be viewed, edited, and even created by product users. Product screens themselves are also built with dashboards. For this reason, a complete dashboard framework provides leverage for both the end users looking to share dashboards with their teams, and the product-engineers of COP solutions like Cisco Cloud Observability.

In the observability space most dashboards are focused on charts and tables for rendering time series data, for example “average response time” or “errors per minute”. The image below shows the COP EBS Volumes Overview Dashboard, which is used to understand the performance of Elastic Block Storage (EBS) on Amazon Web Services. The dashboard features interactive controls (dropdowns) that are used to further-refine the scenario from all EBS volumes to, for example unhealthy EBS volumes in US-WEST-1.

Several other dashboards are provided by our Cisco Cloud Observability app for monitoring other AWS systems. Here are just a few examples of the rapidly expanding use of Dashify dashboards across the Cisco Observability Platform.

• EFS Volumes
• Elastic Load Balancers
• S3 Buckets
• EC2 Instances

Why Dashboards

No observability product can “pre-imagine” every way that customers want to observe their systems. Dashboards allow end-users to create custom experiences, building on existing in-product dashboards, or creating them from scratch. I have seen large organizations with more than 10,000 dashboards across dozens of teams.

Dashboards are a cornerstone of observability, forming a bridge between a remote data source, and local display of data in the user’s browser. Dashboards are used to capture “scenarios” or “lenses” on a particular problem. They can serve a relatively fixed use case, or they can be ad-hoc creations for a troubleshooting “war room.” A dashboard performs many steps and queries to derive the data needed to address the observability scenario, and to render the data into visualizations. Dashboards can be authored once, and used by many different users, leveraging the know-how of the author to enlighten the audience. Dashboards play a critical role in low-level troubleshooting and in rolling up high-level business KPIs to executives.

The goal of dashboard frameworks has always been to provide a way for users, as opposed to ‘developers’, to build useful visualizations. Inherent to this “democratization” of visualizations is the notion that building a dashboard must somehow be easier than a pure JavaScript app development approach. Afterall, dashboards cater to users, not hardcore developers.

The problem with dashboard frameworks

The diagram below illustrates how a traditional dashboard framework allows the author to configure and arrange components but does not allow the author to create new components or data sources. The dashboard author is stuck with whatever components, layouts, and data sources are made available. This is because the areas shown in red are developed in JavaScript and are provided by the framework. JavaScript is neither a secure, nor easy technology to learn, therefore it is rarely exposed directly to authors. Instead, dashboards expose a JSON or YAML based DSL. This typically leaves field teams, SEs, and power users in the position of waiting for the engineering team to release new components, and there is almost always a deep feature backlog.

I have personally seen this scenario play out many times. To take a real example, a team building dashboards for IT services wanted rows in a table to be colored according to a “heat map”. This required a feature request to be logged with engineering, and the core JavaScript-based Table component had to be changed to support heat maps. It became typical for the core JS components to become a mishmash of domain-driven spaghetti code. Eventually the code for Table itself was hard to find amidst the dozens of props and hidden behaviors like “heat maps”. Nobody was happy with the situation, but it was typical, and core component teams mostly spent their sprint cycles building domain behaviors and trying to understand the spaghetti. What if dashboard authors themselves on the power-user end of the spectrum could be empowered to create components themselves?

Enter Dashify

Dashify’s mission is to remove the barrier of “you can’t do that” and “we don’t have a component for that”. To accomplish this, Dashify rethinks some of the foundations of traditional dashboard frameworks. The diagram below shows that Dashify shifts the boundaries around what is “built in” and what is made completely accessible to the Author. This radical shift allows the core framework team to focus on “pure” visualizations, and empowers domain teams, who author dashboards, to build domain specific behaviors like “IT heat maps” without being blocked by the framework team.

To accomplish this breakthrough, Dashify had to solve the key challenge of how to simplify and expose reactive behavior and composition without cracking open the proverbial can of JavaScript worms. To do this, Dashify leveraged a new JSON/YAML meta-language, created at Cisco in the open source, for the purpose of declarative, reactive state management. This new meta-language is called “Stated,” and it is being used to drive dashboards, as well as many other JSON/YAML configurations within the Cisco Observability Platform. Let’s take a simple example to show how Stated enables a dashboard author to insert logic directly into a dashboard JSON/YAML.

Suppose we receive data from a data source that provides “health” about AWS availability zones. Assume the health data is updated asynchronously. Now suppose we wish to bind the changing health data to a table of “alerts” according to some business rules:

1. only show alerts if the percentage of unhealthy instances is greater than 10%

2. show alerts in descending order based on percentage of unhealthy instances

3. update the alerts every time the health data is updated (in other words declare a reactive dependency between alerts and health).

This snippet illustrates a desired state, that adheres to the rules.

But how can we build a dashboard that continuously adheres to the three rules? If the health data changes, how can we be sure the alerts will be updated? These questions get to the heart of what it means for a system to be Reactive. This Reactive scenario is at best difficult to accomplish in today’s popular dashboard frameworks.

Notice we have framed this problem in terms of the data and relationships between different data items (health and alerts), without mentioning the user interface yet. In the diagram above, note the “data manipulation” layer. This layer allows us to create exactly these kinds of reactive (change driven) relationships between data, decoupling the data from the visual components.

Let’s look at how easy it is in Dashify to create a reactive data rule that captures our three requirements. Dashify allows us to replace *any* piece of a dashboard with a reactive rule, so we simply write a reactive rule that generates the alerts from the health. The Stated rule, beginning on line 12 is a JSONata expression. Feel free to try it yourself here.

One of the most interesting things is that it appears you don’t have to “tell” Dashify what data your rule depends on. You just write your rule. This simplicity is enabled by Stated’s compiler, which analyzes all the rules in the template and produces a Reactive change graph. If you change anything that the ‘alerts’ rule is looking at, the ‘alerts’ rule will fire, and recompute the alerts. Let’s quickly prove this out using the stated REPL which lets us run and interact with Stated templates like Dashify dashboards. Let’s see what happens if we use Stated to change the first zone’s unhealthy count to 200. The screenshot below shows execution of the command “.set /health/0/unhealthy 200” in the Stated JSON/YAML REPL. Dissecting this command, it says “set the value at json pointer /health/0/unhealthy to value 200”. We see that the alerts are immediately recomputed, and that us-east-1a is now present in the alerts with 99% unhealthy.

By recasting much of dashboarding as a reactive data problem, and by providing a robust in-dashboard expression language, Dashify allows authors to do both traditional dashboard creation, advanced data bindings, and reusable component creation. Although quite trivial, this example clearly shows how Dashify differentiates its core technology from other frameworks that lack reactive, declarative, data bindings. In fact, Dashify is the first, and only framework to feature declarative, reactive, data bindings.

Let’s take another example, this time fetching data from a remote API. Let’s say we want to fetch data from the Star Wars REST api. Business requirements:

• Developer can set how many pages of planets to return
• Planet details are fetched from star wars api (https://swapi.dev)
• List of planet names is extracted from returned planet details
• User should be able to select a planet from the list of planets
•  ‘residents’ URLs are extracted from planet info (that we got in step 2), and resident details are fetched for each URL
• Full names of inhabitants are extracted from resident details and presented as list

Again, we see that before we even consider the user interface, we can cast this problem as a data fetching and reactive binding problem. The dashboard snippet below shows how a value like “residents” is reactively bound to selectedPlanet and how map/reduce style set operators are applied to entire results of a REST query. Again, all the expressions are written in the grammar of JSONata.

To demonstrate how you can interact with and test such a snippet, checkout This github gist shows a REPL session where we:

1. load the JSON file and observe the default output for Tatooine

2. Display the reactive change-plan for planetName

3. Set the planet name to “Coruscant”

4. Call the onSelect() function with “Naboo” (this demonstrates that we can create functions accessible from JavaScript, for use as click handlers, but produces the same result as directly setting planetName)

From this concise example, we can see that dashboard authors can easily handle fetching data from remote APIs, and perform extractions and transformations, as well as establish click handlers. All these artifacts can be tested from the Stated REPL before we load them into a dashboard. This remarkable economy of code and ease of development cannot be achieved with any other dashboard framework.

If you are curious, these are the inhabitants of Naboo:

What’s next?

We have shown a lot of “data code” in this post. This is not meant to imply that building Dashify dashboards requires “coding”. Rather, it is to show that the foundational layer, which supports our Dashboard building GUIs is built on very solid foundation. Dashify recently made its debut in the CCO product with the introduction of AWS monitoring dashboards, and Data Security Posture Management screens. Dashify dashboards are now a core component of the Cisco Observability Platform and have been proven out over many complex use cases. In calendar Q2 2024, COP will introduce the dashboard editing experience which provides authors with built in visual drag-n-drop style editing of dashboards. Also in calendar Q2, COP introduces the ability to bundle dashify dashboards into COP solutions allowing third party developers to unleash their dashboarding skills. So, weather you skew to the “give me a gui” end of the spectrum or the “let me code” lifestyle, Dashify is designed to meet your needs.

Summing it up

Dashboards are a key, perhaps THE key technology in an observability platform. Existing dashboarding frameworks present unwelcome limits on what authors can do. Dashify is a new dashboarding framework born from many collective years of experience building both dashboard frameworks and their visual components. Dashify brings declarative, reactive state management into the hands of dashboard authors by incorporating the Stated meta-language into the JSON and YAML of dashboards. By rethinking the fundamentals of data management in the user interface, Dashify allows authors unprecedented freedom. Using Dashify, domain teams can ship complex components and behaviors without getting bogged down in the underlying JavaScript frameworks. Stay tuned for more posts where we dig into the exciting capabilities of Dashify: Custom Dashboard Editor, Widget Playground, and Scalable Vector Graphics.

Source: cisco.com

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Is Your Company Still Experiencing Digital Transformation Challenges?

Digital transformation is essential for all businesses, from the smallest to the largest of enterprises. These businesses are striving to become more agile, innovate quickly, and respond to change faster – and they’re turning to modern applications to fuel that change. One of the first steps businesses need to take when commencing on a digital journey is to answer two critical questions: “What business outcomes do you want to achieve?” and “How will you overcome new demands digital transformation places on your IT teams?

There is a saying, “If you are not moving forward, you are falling behind.” This statement could not be any truer than it is in today’s complex and application centric environments.

The History of Digital Transformation

If we look back at Netflix’s journey to reshape markets through digital transformation, it’s easy to see how embracing digital transformation helped the company move forward. As most of us know, Netflix led the way for digital content when it started in 1997 by offering DVD rentals and sales via its website. Customers quickly saw the value in its data insights, called the “Personalized Recommendation System,” which used member ratings to accurately predict a user’s next movie choice. A decade later, in 2007, the company began offering streaming content for personal computers. Another decade passed and in 2017 Netflix won its first academy award for best documentary.

In its first 20 years, Netflix transformed its business model from mailing digital content to streaming digital content, and finally, creating digital content. Why did Netflix succeed when so many others didn’t? Because of its rapid adoption of digital transformation tools and apps. There were many companies that entered the space with Netflix, but those that didn’t embrace digital transformation not only couldn’t keep up, most are no longer in business.

In today’s application centric world, innovations need to happen in days or weeks, not decades. Is your company ensuring its application tools, operations, networking, and security features are working together to transform your business?

Application Challenges Landscape

All industries are making the shift to become more application centric, putting them into a place where they compete on application experience. But to compete effectively, they need to iterate quickly, learn with real-time telemetry, and get that feedback incorporated back into the business application. Changing the way companies monitor and maintain application availability, performance, and security means it’s imperative that they shift their operational model from siloed to collaborative teams. These collaborative teams then need to understand what’s going on from the business perspective to the user experience to the applications performance, the infrastructure, the network, and the security domain.

Enhance your day-to-day tools with a digital upgrade

Customers use many tools to monitor and alert when issues surface. Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and network performance monitoring tools give detailed insights within their silos. While those individual parts are important, what really matters is how those tools work together, as well as how they impact application performance and the end user experience.

Cisco is uniquely positioned with its broad product portfolio to provide the tools, insights, automations, and integrations that give users visibility across the entire stack, otherwise known as “full stack visibility.” This delivers insights into application-to-application dependencies, application-to-infrastructure dependencies, infrastructure performance and availability, infrastructure resources utilization (compute, storage, and memory), end-to-end visibility, and business outcomes. To improve performance and availabilty, protect the workload wherever it’s located, reach a faster MTTR, and maintain exceptional customer experience requires giving day-to-day tools a digital upgrade.

In order to ensure your company has the best digital journey possible, the following products offer additional insights and automation: 

Data Insight Tools

◉ AppDynamics (AppD). An application performance management (APM) tool that manages performance and availability of applications across cloud and DC. Appd baselines, monitors, and reports on the performance of all transactions that flow through your app.

◉ Cisco Workload Optimization Manager(CWOM). Software that continuously analyzes workload consumption, costs, and compliance constraints, while automatically allocating resources in real-time. It assures workload performance by giving workloads the resources they need, when they need them.

◉ Tetration. Hybrid-Cloud workload protection platform to secure workloads. Using machine learning, behavior analysis, and algorithmic approaches to offer holistic workload-protection strategy. This approach allows the implementation of true micro-segmentation, proactive identification of security incidents, and reduction of attack surface by identifying software vulnerabilities.

Automation Tools

◉ ACI anywhere. Technology that supports integrating virtual and physical workloads in a programmable, multi-hypervisor fabric to build a multiservice or cloud data center. The ACI fabric consists of discrete components that operate as routers and switches, but it is provisioned and monitored as a single entity.

◉ Intersight. A unified management platform that delivers intuitive management across data centers and remote locations from a single management platform. This platform offers an intelligent level of management that enables IT organizations to analyze, simplify, and automate their environments in ways that were not possible with prior generations of tools.

◉ Networks Assurance Engine (NAE). A comprehensive, intent-assurance solution that mathematically verifies the entire data center network for correctness, providing users with the confidence that the network is operating as intended.

◉ CloudCenter (CC). Multi-cloud management software that helps enterprises work with disparate environments. CC delivers workflow automation, ALM, cost optimization, and governance across multiple clouds.

It’s much easier to identify the root cause of an issue quickly and accurately with a tight integration of the above-mentioned products, third party applications, such as ServiceNow, InforBlox, Moogosoft, and more, along with end-to-end dependencies and the specific details of each layer. By doing this, your IT teams will work collaboratively and not in solitude.

A subset of the integrations and how the products collaborate to bring exceptional application experience

The diagram above shows how Cisco ACI, with AppD integration, identifies problems faster by correlating applications and network data. Cisco then provides the dynamic correlation between application and network constructs, and notes the problems with application services on a network fabric that can then be investigated by the application and networking teams, each with their own separate tools.

NAE will inform CWOM of any network anomalies so those issues are part of the recomendation process CWOM uses in its decision engine. NAE effectively makes CWOM “Network Aware,”  and CloudCenter will model an application and apply an AppD agent as part of that profile.  Deploying the AppD enabled profile using CC will allow the AppD controller to trigger action for CC based on metrics from AppD. Tetration and CWOM team up by using Tetration’s analytics.  CWOM can take Tetration’s application dependency mapping between endpoints by localizing chatty workloads that were across clusters, datacenters, and cloud to reduce latency.

Application Needs Rule the Day

It’s no longer adequate – or sustainable – to take a legacy approach to ensuring application experience, availability, and security are working properly in today’s technology environment. These modern day applications demand superior experience be delivered, whether they are executed on-prem, hybrid, or in cloud datacenters. Using a combination of tools from Cisco enables the scale, performance, visibility, and operational excellence needed for efficient deployment of all next-generation applications, helping companies overcome their greatest digital transformation challenges.

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Cisco Brings the Power of the Cloud and AI to Contact Centers with Release 12.5

“I need the business agility, flexibility, and speed of new feature delivery that cloud offers while protecting my contact center investments.”

“I need to modernize my customer and agent experiences to remain competitive.”

“I need easy access to cloud-based applications that work seamlessly with my on-premises contact center infrastructure”

Do These Challenges Sound Familiar?

You’re not alone! Many of our customers across the globe and from many industries have shared with us their struggle to balance the need for innovation with cloud-based capabilities powered by artificial intelligence (AI) to stay competitive while maximizing their valuable on-premises contact center investments in people, process, and technology.

They’ve expressed their desire for an open and secure platform that gives them reliability and business continuity, with new flexibility and agility needed to meet the ever-changing demands of their business. And they’re looking for unique ways to create differentiated experiences for both their employees and customers that will result in better customer experiences, repeat business, and improved performance of their contact center.

Cisco is addressing these needs with Release 12.5 – our latest software for Unified Contact Center Enterprise, Packaged Contact Center Enterprise, Unified Contact Center Express, and Hosted Collaboration Solution for Contact Center.  We’re introducing some exciting new capabilities designed to simplify how you manage your contact center, make your agents more productive, and create better experiences for your customers.

Highlights of What’s New

◉ Webex Experience Management (formerly CloudCherry), our new customer experience management solution, is integrated into the Cisco agent desktop providing agents and supervisors with customer sentiment, journey insights, and feedback metrics in real-time.

◉ An intuitive conversational IVR, powered by Google Dialogflow improves customer self-service experiences over the phone by easily adding modern speech interfaces to existing self-service options.

◉ Customer Journey Analyzer, our cloud-based advanced analytics reporting solution is now available for trial to all our on-premises contact center customers.

◉ AI-based Voicea call transcript and summary are also available for trials to improve agent productivity, call wrap-up and accuracy of action items.

◉ Smart Licensing provides a simple, automated way to add/activate new software licenses to keep up with fluctuating interaction volumes.

Integration with Webex Experience Management (formerly CloudCherry)

Our new AI-powered, cloud-based customer experience solution can be integrated with your contact center via two new agent desktop gadgets. The solution enables contact centers to capture customer feedback utilizing an easy-to-use survey designer.  Once feedback is captured, agents have the ability to view customer feedback scores within their agent desktop via the new Customer Experience Journey gadget, giving them real-time visibility into customer sentiment and past journey experiences so they can truly understand how the customer is feeling and be able to personalize their interaction with the customer. The Customer Experience Analytics gadget displays the overall pulse of customer feedback through industry-standard metrics, such as NPS, CSAT, and CES.

Innovative AI-Powered Self-Service

Our Cisco Unified Customer Voice Portal leverages Google Dialogflow, allowing AI to bring speech-to-text, NLU-based intent detection, and text-to-speech capabilities to create an efficient conversational self-service experience for your customers while relieving agents of simple and repetitive tasks.

Business Insights via Cloud Analytics

Bringing the power of cloud analytics to all Cisco on-premises contact centers, Customer Journey Analyzer provides advanced out-of-the-box reporting, arming contact center managers with historical data from multiple contact center deployments to generate specific business views across the business.  It displays trends to help supervisors identify patterns and gain insights for making continuous improvements, and it includes an Abandoned Contacts dashboard to identify where customers are abandoning the journey so that appropriate and proactive actions can be taken. Available for trial now.

Voicea Call Transcript

We’ve created a new Cisco agent desktop gadget that uses our very own Voicea AI, leveraging accurate speech-to-text technology to provide a complete transcription of the interaction between agent and customer. This exciting new feature, which is available now for field trial with Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise, simplifies call wrap-up and helps agents accurately capture the details of the conversation, improving call continuity and agent productivity. 

Licensing Made Simple

Smart Licensing enables contact centers to remain agile and quickly add/activate new software licenses to keep up with fluctuating interaction volumes.  Using the Cisco Smart Software Management Portal, our customers can easily see in real-time how many total licenses they have and how many are in use, giving them peace of mind and an accurate measure of their license inventory.

Improved Agent Experience

We’re making your agents more productive and their experience more intuitive with new keyboard shortcuts, drag and drop desktop gadgets, and the ability to update call variables during interactions. Agents can also view their statistics in real-time now.

Secure and Scalable 

Our new release also includes a variety of security-related enhancements that further harden the solution against potential vulnerabilities.  At the same time, we continue stretching scale limits by doubling outbound calls per second and total supported dialer ports, and 2.5 times increase in simultaneous active campaigns.

All Our Customers Benefit

I’m excited about how the cloud brings all these enhancements to our on-premises customers. Our goal continues to be to bring all our customers the latest technological innovations available today, regardless of whether they own their contact center system or subscribe to it as a service, and to give them a practical and simple path to the cloud at a pace that’s just right for them.

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Enter The Cloud Maturity Era (Until The Next One)

Just before the end of the year we announced and made available our latest hybrid solution, a product of collaborating with AWS, the Cisco Hybrid Solution for Kubernetes on AWS (yes there are definitely more words in that title that I can count in one hand).

And at the same AWS re:Invent that we first showcased our solution, AWS announced more than 60 new features and services for their platform; new compute instances, storage and archiving, databases, data lakes, blockchain, ML/AI, serverless, networking and control services.

Amongst many topics at that conference, cost management was especially hot, and validates what we have been hearing from customers a lot lately. So at our equivalent annual European conference, Cisco Live, in Barcelona, we announced our Cisco CloudCenter Suite (including enhanced cost management features) as well as ACI Anywhere, enabling customers to extend their on-premises data center networks directly to pubic clouds.

And what happened in those few short months is just the tip of the iceberg. This amount of innovation coming from the industry is evidence of the industry maturing.

Customers are now evaluating and planning to adopt more advanced solutions between on-premises and public clouds than just IaaS and SaaS, and the industry is responding to this demand with a new generation of offerings.

Scaling up innovation

Is this really new news? What has been the evolution of cloud computing and what does that tell us about the paradigm, the market and its future overall?

Let’s take a step back. In 2012’s Gartner’s Hype Cycle, more mature cloud offerings and concepts PaaS or “cloud-optimized application design” were given 2-5 years for mainstream adoption, as opposed to IaaS or SaaS.

And looking at the date today makes you think they were about right, weren’t they? Score one for Gartner.

Indeed, we are slowly moving towards the maturity of the “platform” era, where cloud computing is about to become more interesting, honouring its roots to service-oriented architecture moving further away from being just a technical answer to an infrastructure use cases to being more closely aligned to business initiatives.

The result? To better align with business use cases, cloud computing will necessarily become more industry-specific and modular, being consumable directly by line of business users or developers in the form of reuseable building blocks.

And we’re talking not just about services from the leading public cloud providers but also from the myriads of different SaaS vendors that will come up with new offerings to support better or new use cases.

Unlocking innovation comes after internal change

But new technologies and solutions don’t mean anything without an interal readiness to adopt them. Cloud computing is driving more and deeper organizational change by decomposing technology silos, processes and teams.

It is therefore no surprise that in that same 2012 Hype Cycle, the term “DevOps” was just making its premiere appearance in the magic quadrant with a 5-10 years projection to maturity (notice that hybrid cloud and hybrid IT fall in the same bucket).

This amazing universe of innovation on top of a new landscape of technology is forcing change and requires organizations to adapt to adopt.

Change is not always easy to implement. It involves people, technology, process…in other words, the “big picture.” It involves being able to navigate between managing the on-premises existing investments in infrastructure and applications and deciding what portion to modernize and what to replace with new, all while increasing the adoption of public cloud services.

It also involves defining new governance models that drive a new culture in the way development and infrastructure teams collaborate together, especially when new offerings are further decoupling the infrastructure layer from the application.

And of course, we can’t forget the critical requirement of managing risk during the process.

The cloud era is producing a huge amount of opportunity and innovation. And how do organizations respond? By building strategies based on where they are in their own technology journey. And that can take time.

 A new kind of hybrid solution

And that brings up back to the present. Our collaboration with AWS was exactly based on making that connection between our customers’ existing environments and the innovation of the AWS platform. Im other words, it takes into account the need to combine “the existing and the new” as part of their multicloud strategy and is aimed at customers that want to maintain control while extending their investments with interoperable components.

The Cisco Hybrid Solution for Kubernetes on AWS is the first hybrid solution in the industry to integrate directly with AWS’s managed Kubernetes offering (EKS) – essentially a hybrid Container-as-a-Service offering.

This means users responsible for deploying Kubernetes clusters and handing them off to developer teams don’t have to manually deploy and configure Kubernetes on top of AWS’s IaaS layer. They can use the solution to both deploy on-premises and trigger deployment on AWS EKS, creating a consistent environment for developers to run applications.

Practically speaking, it means less time spent on operations and a common authentication method across the two locations.

Futhermore, the part that makes the solution truly extensible and goes beyond containers, is the optional software that supports the full lifecycle of existing, non-containerized applications and hardware on-premises or in other clouds. CSR1000v for connecting, CloudCenter Suite for deploying, Stealthwatch Cloud for securing, and AppDynamics for monitoring.

The result? Customers can now make containers and Kubernetes a core engine of their strategy and innovation and increase adoption of public cloud services, without creating more silos that don’t integrate with their existing investments and assets.

Just like many areas of cloud offerings, Kubernetes-based solutions are maturing and driving change for organizations. Successful organizations in multicloud will not be the early adopters necessarily, but the ones that adopt the latest and greatest in the best way to fit their strategy.

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Microservices Deployments with Cisco Container Platform

Technological developments in the age of Industry 4.0 are accelerating some business sectors at a head-spinning pace. Innovation is fueling the drive for greater profitability. One way that tech managers are handling these changes is through the use of microservices, enabled by containers. And as usual, Cisco is taking advantage of the latest technologies.

From Cost Center to Profit Center

In this new world, IT departments are being asked to evolve from cost centers to profit centers. However, virtualization and cloud computing are not enough. New services developed in the traditional way often take too long to adapt to existing infrastructures.

Because of such short life cycles, IT professionals need the tools to implement these technologies almost immediately. Sometimes one company may have many cloud providers in a multicloud environment. Containers give IT managers the control they were used to in the data center.

Microservices and Containers

But what if you could break up these entangled IT resources into smaller pieces, then make them work independently on any existing platform? Developers find this new combination of Microservices and containers offers much greater flexibility and scalability. Containers offer significant advantages over mere virtualization. Containers supercharge today’s state-of-the-art hyperconverged platforms and they are cost-effective

A remaining challenge is to get companies to use containers. The adoption of a new technology often depends how easy it is to deploy. One of the early players in container technology is Kubernetes. But getting Kubernetes up and running can be a major task. You can do it the hard way using this tutorial from Kelsey Hightower. Or you can take the easy route, using the Google Container Engine (GKE).

Cisco Container Platform

Another easy-to-use solution is the Cisco Container Platform (CCP). Cisco’s takes advantage of the company’s robust hardware platforms and software orchestration capabilities. CCP uses reliable Cisco equipment that enable users to deploy Kubernetes, with options for adding cloud security, audit tools, and connectivity to hybrid clouds. Notice the growing popularity of the Kubernetes platform in the graph below:

Use Cases

Space does not permit the inclusion of all the potential use cases of Cisco Container Platform and its accompanying software solution. Here are just a few examples we would like to highlight:

#1: Kubernetes in your Data Center

For agility and scale, nothing beats native Kubernetes. Developers can easily deploy and run container applications without all the puzzle pieces required in traditional deployments. This means a new app can be up and running in minutes rather than days or weeks. Just create one or more Kubernetes clusters in Cisco Container Platform using the graphical user interface. If more capacity is needed for special purposes, simply add new nodes. CCP supports app lifecycle management with Kubernetes clusters and allows for continuous monitoring and logging.

#2: Multi-tier App Deployment Using Jenkins on Kubernetes

Developers are often frustrated because of the time it takes to get their applications into production using traditional methods. But these days it’s critical to get releases out fast. Using open-source solutions, Cisco Container Platform is able to create the continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline that developers are looking for. CCP takes advantage of Jenkins, an open-source automation server that runs on a Kubernetes engine.

BayInfotech (BIT) works closely with customers to implement these CI/CD integrations on the Cisco Container Platform. While it may seem complicated, once the infrastructure is set up and running, developers find it easy to create and deploy new code into the system.

#3: Hybrid Cloud with Kubernetes

The Cisco Container Platform makes it easier for customers to deploy and manage container-based applications across hybrid cloud environments. Currently, hybrid cloud environments are is being achieved between HyperFlex as an on-premises data center and GKE as a public cloud.

#4: Persistent Data with Persistent Volumes

Containers are not meant to retain data indefinitely. In the case of deletion, eviction or node failure, all container data may be lost. It involves the use of persistent volumes and persistent volume claims to store data. Further, when a container crashes for any reason, application data will be always retained on the persistent volume. Customer can reuse the persistent volumes to relaunch the application deployment so that customer will never lose the application data.

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Why Our Partnership With Cisco is Crucial on the Road to Cloud

In Logicalis we see the cloud as the future. With our “Application Anywhere” vision we are following exactly what our customers require – putting more focus on the application, and providing the flexible infrastructure in accordance with cutting-edge hybrid cloud methodologies.

We are able to build a flexible underlay for our customers, so that they can build their applications however they like and wherever they like, using Virtual Machines or Microservices, in secure, single or multicloud environments, and give them the choice of the economic and end-to-end technical model of their preference.

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