Google has made its Container Engine service for managing Docker containers on its cloud platform generally available. This means Google now considers the service production ready, and is backed by its 99.5% service-level agreement.

As of today, organizations that wish to run Docker containers on Google’s cloud can manage and orchestrate their container clusters via Container Engine.

If you’re wondering why it’s worth running containers on Google’s cloud, consider that Google is probably the world’s biggest Linux container user, and therefore has more experience at running them than most. According to Google Product Manage Craig Mcluckie, the company spins up as many as two billion containers across its global data centers each and every week.

“Container Engine represents the best of our experience with containers,” he wrote in a blog post.

Linux containers have actually been around for years, but have only become widespread among organizations in the last few years thanks to the efforts of Docker Inc., which runs the open-source Docker project.

Docker created a standard for container images, plus a system that makes it easy for organizations to implement them in production. As a result, containers have become so popular that cloud platforms like Google, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure have rushed to support the technology, introducing cloud services around it that ensure it’s well on the way to becoming mainstream.

Linux containers promise to deliver more efficient data center resource utilization and to make it easier to write applications, no matter what kind of infrastructure they’re for. Docker container apps can run on-premise or in the cloud, on bare-metal servers or inside virtual machines.

Container Engine builds on Google’s open-source Kubernetes container management tool that was recently donated to the new Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Container Engine takes the premise further, allowing container clusters to be fully managed in the cloud without worrying about software updates or cluster availability.

“Container Engine is fully managed by Google reliability engineers, so you don’t have to worry about cluster availability or software updates,” Mcluckie wrote. “Container Engine also makes application management easier. Your cluster is equipped with common capabilities, such as logging and container health checking, to give you insight into how your application is running. And, as your application’s needs change, resizing your cluster with more CPU or memory is easy.”

Which means all the developer is required to do is specify what kind of memory and CPU his containers need, how many replicas he wants, and define a “keepalive” policy. Container Engine then sets up the infrastructure as needed.

Google says Container Engine can be used free of charge for basic clusters with up to five virtual machines, though the required Compute Engine instances will still need to be paid for. For standard clusters with up to 100 virtual machines, Google is charging $0.15 per hour, plus the costs of Compute Engine and any other platforms used.

Image credit: Peter van Marion via flickr.com