Google Cloud Platform Event

Cloud today has not yet become what developers want. The promise of cloud computing today is realized only in part: there are still too many problems associated with the development and on-premises deployment.

Google sees an opportunity here and wants to do even better. During the second Google Cloud Platform Live at Mission Bay Convention Center in San Francisco, the search giant launched several new cloud features for its public cloud with the goal to take the lead over rivals Microsoft and Amazon Web Services. With features like network options that connect directly into the Google cloud with its latest VPN and yet another price drop, Google tries to compete with its competitors in the enterprise market.

Docker-as-a-Service

One of Google’s biggest launches delivers Docker containers that are scheduled with a managed compute cluster. The Google Container Engine allows developers to move from the management of application components that run on individual virtual machines to the launch of Docker portable containers that are programmed specifically within an automatically managed cluster.

The transferable and redistributable, platform-independent Docker technique consists of a runtime engine and a packaging tool that will allow substantially reduced time to distribute and run apps.

Developers can create and link container-based services, relying on Google’s service to deliver registration, monitoring and integrity management. Based on the open source Kubernetes project and Google Compute Engine VMs, Container Engine is designed as an optimized and efficient way to build applications based on the container.

By leveraging open the source project, Google hopes to offer a high level of mobility for workloads, facilitating the movement of applications between development machines, on-premises and public providers on cloud. This alone will be a huge boon to DevOps teams working to shorten deployment cycle-time by containerizing components and letting the management engine do much of the heavy-lifting.

The container-based applications can be performed anywhere, but the combination of rapid initialization, efficiency hosting virtual machines, and seamless integration of virtualized network means that Google Cloud Platform is one of the best places to manage them.

“If you treat containers as the same kind of client-server model on which you’ve been developing your applications, that’s not going to get you that agility that you need to respond in today’s marketplace,” said Google VP of engineering Jörg Heilig.

Google Compute Engine also comes with new Autoscaler feature. It uses the same technology used by Google to manage the large overloads smoothly, and allows developers to dynamically resize a fleet of virtual machines based on usage and a wide variety of signals, from QPS of a HTTP Load Balancer, to VM CPU utilization, or custom metrics from the Cloud Monitoring service.

With Docker-as-a-Service, Google’s idea is to get cloud customers thinking beyond simply moving existing workloads out of their own data centers and into the cloud, to actually developing new applications in a cloud-first way.

Managed VMs in App Engine

The announcement of the Docker based container engine is not the only new feature in Google’s cloud-range.

Google also announced a new feature for its service PaaS “App Engine” mode, with the beta release of Managed VMs. This includes the management of self-scaling and support runtimes based on the technology of containerization Docker. App Engine provides and configures all necessary ancillary services for the creation of productive applications (network routing, load balancing, autoscaling, monitoring and recording), so developers can focus on application development.

Users can use any language or library and customize or replace the entire runtime stack. Thus, it is now also possible to use Node.js with the App Engine. In addition, developers have access to the widest range of types of virtual machine offered by Compute Engine.

Next, Google has announced Direct Peering, which will allow large companies to directly connect their facilities with more than 70 points of presence in Google in 33 countries worldwide.

The company also released a program called Interconnect with multiple partners (IX Reach Equinix, Level 3, Tata Communications, Telx, Verizon, and Zayo). End users hosting workloads with one of these companies can now directly connect their data to the Google cloud.

In addition to the developments in public cloud, Google has improved network connectivity options and allow the creation of applications in real time via the web and Firebase mobile release.

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