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Cisco Intersight® Kubernetes Service (IKS) is a subscription-based service in the Cisco Intersight cloud-operations platform for simplifying production-grade Kubernetes across on-premises, edge, and cloud infrastructures.
Cisco Intersight Kubernetes Service (IKS) accelerates customers’ cloud-native journey and ensures that their container infrastructure is secure, consistent, and in compliance. With Intersight Kubernetes Service, organizations can quickly, easily, and consistently deploy production-grade Kubernetes and manage cluster lifecycle across on-premises and public clouds without requiring deep expertise with Kubernetes. Developers get the self-service access to resources they expect from 100-percent upstream Kubernetes, and infrastructure and operations teams maintain policy and security controls to secure compliance.
Also included with advantage tier licensing, is a service mesh which provides full application visibility and telemetry combined with full infrastructure visibility through the Intersight cloud-operations platform. This serves as the foundation for infrastructure and operations teams across the organization to quickly understand how applications are operating and to diagnose issues in real time before they impact the business.
Intersight Kubernetes Service additionally offers true hybrid-cloud flexibility with native integration of existing Kubernetes clusters including Amazon EKS, Azure AKS, and Google Cloud GKE, as well as third-party on-premises Kubernetes distributions. This enables organizations to expand and manage their existing on-premises Kubernetes infrastructure and public clouds consistently, using one product to deploy applications such as a service mesh, as opposed to using cloud-managed hybrid-cloud proprietary solutions or tools by multiple vendors. For organizations with tighter regulatory requirements, there is also an “air-gapped” deployment option where Kubernetes can be deployed offline, making cloud-native application deployment not bound to public clouds.
Technical features and benefits
Table 1. Technical features and benefits
| Feature |
Benefit |
| Cisco® Service Mesh Manager |
Included with the advantage license, service mesh manager for simplified Istio operations and deployment Simplifies day-2 operations, including industry-standard canary upgrades Deep visibility of Service Level Objectives (SLOs) at a per-service level |
| Cisco Intersight Workload Engine |
Included KVM-based enterprise virtualization solution Automates networking, storage, compute, virtualization, and operating systems deployment |
| Attached clusters |
Support for third-party and public cloud service Kubernetes Enables multicloud and hybrid control over Kubernetes |
| L4/L7 load balancing |
Load balances network traffic for Layers 4 and 7 |
| “Air gap” support |
Optionally deploy Kubernetes offline and to sovereign cloud Purpose-built for the strictest regulatory requirements |
| Optimized for AI/ML workloads |
Simplified deployment of Kubernetes and containers for AI/ML workloads Support for automated GPU management, optimization, and utilization with multi-instance GPUs |
Table 2. Single Advantage license tier
|
|
|
| Advantage tier |
● Create Kubernetes clusters on top of any hardware on premises
● Manage the lifecycle with automatic, curated OS and Kubernetes updates
● Full stack visibility in Cisco Intersight cloud-operations platform
● Automated GPU and multi-instance management
● Cisco Service Mesh Manager
● Cisco Intersight Workload Engine
● Attach third-party clusters and public Kubernetes services
|
Virtual machine to connect 3rd party devices
Cisco Intersight Kubernetes communicates with on-premises infrastructure using a virtual machine. Any device that is supported by Cisco Intersight but does not connect directly with it, will need a connection mechanism. A virtual machine provides that connection and helps you add devices into Cisco Intersight. You can install the appliance on VMware ESXi 6.5 or higher. It comes packaged in an Open Virtual Appliance (OVA) file format.
Resource requirements for the virtual machine are recommended as medium or large types based on the number of Kubernetes clusters and is only required if ESXi is used as the hypervisor for the Kubernetes infrastructure.
Table 3. Resource and system requirements
| Resource requirement |
Minimum system requirements |
| VCPU (3 control nodes and workers as needed) |
2CPUs (control and expand as worker node scale) 2 vCPUs (worker minimum) |
| RAM (in GiB) |
16G RAM (expand on control/worker as needed) |
| Storage (disk in GiB) |
40 GB |
| Supported Hypervisors |
ESXi or vCenter version 7.0+, Intersight Workload Engine |
Table 4. Cisco Intersight Kubernetes Service ordering information
| Part # |
Product description |
| DC-MGT-SAAS |
Product family – Cisco Intersight |
| DC-MGT-KS-SAAS-AD |
Cisco Intersight Kubernetes Service Advantage vCPU pricing |
| DC-MGT-KS-PVAPP-AD |
Cisco Intersight Private Virtual Appliance - Kubernetes Service Advantage vCPU pricing |
Cisco Services for Cisco Intersight Kubernetes Service
Cisco Customer Experience (CX) offers a variety of services to accelerate time to value for Cisco Intersight Kubernetes Service. Cisco CX leverages Cisco best practices to deliver training content and expert resources on demand, empowering organizations to accelerate their cloud-native journey with Intersight Kubernetes Service. Cisco CX offers guidance for getting to results with service offerings ranging from deployment to expansion of the solution with sophisticated automation or customized integrations
For more information, contact your Cisco sales representative or learn more.
Flexible payment solutions to help you achieve your objectives
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Simplify and automate container and microservices operations with Cisco Intersight Kubernetes Service, a turnkey flexible SaaS platform that makes it easy to deploy and manage clusters anywhere.
Learn more here.