Cisco and Canonical Collaborate on Policy-Based OpenStack Clouds

Canonical is pleased that Cisco, developer of the Application Centric Infrastructure is joining the Ubuntu Cloud OpenStack Interoperability Lab (OIL). Cisco implements application policy as part of OpenStack Group Based Policy (GBP) and the Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC) – delivering application policies to improve performance and simplify management of private clouds.

As the OpenStack ecosystem continues to grow rapidly, so does our OpenStack Interoperability Lab. In OIL, Canonical conducts interoperability testing on 3,000 plus cloud configurations each month, now with Cisco ACI along with 32 other OIL partners on Ubuntu OpenStack. OIL delivers customers the confidence that components of an OpenStack cloud work together – making it easier to deploy and consume cloud resources. OIL will provide Juju charms for Cisco ACI APIC  and GBP, making it extremely easy to deploy application policy in OpenStack.

Juju is a state-of–the–art, open source, service orchestration tool that captures application-specific knowledge such as dependencies, scale-out practices, operational events like backups and updates and integration options. Juju allows you to configure, manage, maintain, deploy, and scale your workloads quickly and efficiently on public clouds, as well as on physical servers, OpenStack, and containers. You can use Juju from the command line or through its beautiful GUI. Juju charms define everything you all collaboratively know about deploying that particular service brilliantly. All you have to do is use any available charm (or write your own), and the corresponding service will be deployed in minutes, on any cloud or server or virtual machine.

GBP and Cisco ACI APIC will be incorporated into OIL and tested with Ubuntu OpenStack making it easier for Canonical customers to deploy and use, along with solutions from over 25 other partner hardware and software providers.

“We are excited to join Canonical OpenStack Integration Lab.” said Mike Cohen, Director of Product Management for Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure. “With Juju charms for GBP and Cisco ACI APIC plug-in, developers can very quickly create an OpenStack network that accurately reflects application policies for scale, performance, availability and security.  Working with other charms, customers can automate service orchestration for a variety of new cloud applications.”

John Zannos, VP Cloud Alliances at Canonical said: “We’re delighted to welcome Cisco to the Ubuntu Cloud Partner community. Canonical and Cisco are providing openness and OpenStack interoperability across a diverse set of technologies. With Cisco’s Group Based Policy and ACI in OIL, we will simplify new application provisioning, security and governance with OpenStack. Through OIL, we run OpenStack testing in combination with solutions from all our Ubuntu Cloud partners to provide validation of interoperability.”

OpenStack has emerged as a preferred open-source cloud management platform based on its openness, interoperability, flexibility and large highly active community of users, developers and vendors. It has also established itself as the platform of choice for NFV workloads. According to the most recent OpenStack Foundation global survey, Ubuntu is the most popular host and guest operating system for OpenStack, with more than half of all OpenStack instances running Ubuntu, and 70 percent of the Public Cloud Guest operating system market.