In this podcast with Ken Owens and Ben Schumacher of Cisco, they talk to The New Stack about Cisco’s approach to container orchestration and management in cloud native and enterprise ecosystems. Owens talks about how orchestrating infrastructure and cloud has changed with the trend towards infrastructure as code, and the emphasis on new forms of schedulers. Many of the changes in this ecosystem, and in the way tools are managed, have directly influenced Cisco’s Mantl offering, which is essentially a curated take on how to run a container stack. Much of the conversation centers around Schumacher and Owens talking about the next generation of cloud-native architectures, changing system complexity, and the pace of tooling evolution in the container ecosystem. They cap off the conversation with a discussion about what advancements are needed with current orchestration platforms.

Ken Owens is CTO of Cloud Infrastructure Services (CIS) at Cisco Systems. Ken is responsible for creating and communicating technical/scientific vision and strategy for CIS business. He brings a compelling view of the technology trends in enterprise IT (e.g., infrastructure, computing, SaaS, virtualization and cloud) and evangelizes the technology roadmap for the business. Before joining Cisco in 2014, Ken spent over seven years at Savvis as the Chief Scientist, CTO, and VP of Security and Virtualization Technologies.

Ben Schumacher is an architect within the CTO's Office for Cisco Intercloud Services (CIS), and a lead on the Mantl and Shipped projects. After having spent over 15 years creating highly scalable software for Jabber Inc. and Cisco, he has developed a deep understanding of software and cloud architectures.