Google LLC’s cloud unit will make GKE Enterprise, its managed Kubernetes service for large organizations, generally available next Wednesday.

The company announced the move at the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America conference taking place today in Chicago. GKE Enterprise’s rollout comes about two months after it was first previewed by Google. Customers of the service will receive free access to a recently debuted feature, Advanced Vulnerability Insights, that is also moving into general availability.

GKE, or Google Kubernetes Engine, is a managed Kubernetes service that Google launched in 2014. It reduces the amount of effort involved in running container environments. GKE automatically adds and removes hardware resources as workloads requirements change, spares users the need to manually download Kubernetes updates, and eases a range of other maintenance tasks.

GKE Enterprise is an enhanced version of the service geared toward large organizations, providing the ability to run multiple Kubernetes clusters side by side. An enterprise with multiple subsidiaries, for example, could use GKE Enterprise to let each unit create its own dedicated container environment. 

The service allows administrators to manage and monitor multiple Kubernetes clusters through a single pane of glass. To ease configuration changes, it provides the ability to define how cluster settings should be set up in a collection of code files. When an administrator updates the configuration defined in those code files, GKE Enterprise automatically applies the change to all the relevant Kubernetes clusters.

“You spend less time and effort managing the platform and more time creating amazing apps and experiences for your customers,” Google Cloud product management executives Snehal Patel and Dave Bartoletti wrote in a blog post today.

The service also offers several networking features not available in the standard version of GKE. It includes a managed service mesh, a networking technology that eases tasks such as monitoring the flow of data between containers and detecting technical issues. There’s also a more specialized tool designed to coordinate the traffic of applications deployed across multiple Kubernetes clusters.

Alongside its networking capabilities, GKE Enterprise offers a cybersecurity feature called Advanced Vulnerability Insights. The feature, which became generally available today, automatically scans the open-source components installed in a Kubernetes cluster for security flaws. Advanced Vulnerability Insights can analyze open-source projects written in Java, Go, JavaScript and Python.

Google says that GKE Enterprise can provide significant productivity improvements for software teams. According to the company, early adopters have improved developer productivity by up to 45%. Google is also promising a more than 70% decrease in software deployment times for some application projects. 

Image: Google