Cisco is getting into the public cloud, in a sense, by teaming up with Google in a partnership announced today.

Enterprises will now be able to meld an on-premises Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO) network with Google Cloud Platform (GCP), managing the mixture as if it were one environment. One probable use case is to add GCP-based features to a service that's still running on-premises.

We've got the full story on Enterprise Cloud News.

Separately, Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) today launched a managed service around Kubernetes, the container orchestration platform that's becoming a de facto standard. Mitch Wagner has that story on ECN -- see Microsoft Launches Kubernetes as a Managed Service.

Why is that relevant? Because, as we've reported, there's a theory that Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) has a master plan to open the cloud, starting with Kubernetes. Even if that's not true, the Cisco deal and Microsoft's tighter embrace of Kubernetes might bring that open-cloud world a couple of steps closer to reality.

— Craig Matsumoto, Editor-in-Chief, Light Reading