Cisco Systems Inc said on Thursday it is teaming with Amazon.com Inc's Amazon Web Services to offer software tools that would make it easier for Cisco's customers to use Amazon's data centers to run their business applications.

Containers and Kubernetes have emerged as key technologies to give developers more agility, portability, and speed — both in how applications are developed and in how they are deployed. But, properly configuring Kubernetes to deploy applications on-premises and in the public cloud requires custom integrations that can be an operational challenge.

The Cisco Hybrid Solution for Kubernetes on AWS enables Cisco's customers to securely deploy, connect, and monitor containerized applications in Kubernetes clusters consistently across private data centers and the AWS cloud. Cisco offers its customers both their cloud and on-premises environments with a single solution and enterprise-class support.

This is achieved by configuring on-premises Kubernetes environments to be consistent with Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (Amazon EKS) and by combining Cisco's networking, security, management and monitoring software with AWS' cloud services.

With this solution, containerized applications can be deployed and managed more easily across on-premises and the AWS cloud. In addition, it reduces the
complexity and costs for IT operations teams, since the management of on-premises Kubernetes infrastructure is simplified with a common set of tools on-premises and on AWS.

Containerized applications will work with existing resources and production environments, and Cisco's enterprise support will cover all parts of the solution.

The Cisco Hybrid Solution for Kubernetes on AWS will be available to Cisco's customers in December 2018. It will be provided as both a software-only solution requiring only the Cisco Container Platform, or a hardware/software solution with the Cisco Container Platform running on Cisco HyperFlex. The software is licensed in one-, three- and five-year subscriptions. Pricing for software-only subscriptions will start at approximately $65,000 per year for a typical entry-level configuration. On AWS, customers pay $0.20 per hour for each Amazon EKS cluster that they create in addition to the AWS resources (e.g. Amazon EC2 instances or Amazon Elastic Block Store volumes) they create to run Kubernetes worker nodes.

The new solution will be sold by Cisco and its partner network. The platform will be supported by Cisco's technical support. Cisco DevNet will also provide an online resource for developers to trial and benchmark hybrid cloud applications using the solution.

The move is part of a push at Cisco, one of the biggest suppliers of the routers and switches that send data across computer networks, to derive more revenue from software.

Cisco last year inked a similar deal with Google's cloud offering.