Google Inc. is making it easier for enterprises to get application container workloads up and running on its cloud platform with new automated management of nodes, or servers on a network.

The new features came the same day as the company announced general availability of its Container Optimized OS, and Kubernetes 1.6, its container orchestration platform. Google said the automated node management capabilities will help companies to monitor their container nodes and ensure they’re in good health. In a blog post Tuesday, Google software engineer Maisem Ali said that previously, it was up to administrators to keep tabs on this.

Now, instead of needing to upgrade nodes in a container cluster manually, administrators can enable automatic upgrades to the latest, tested node releases as soon as they’re available. Once enabled, the feature ensures that nodes needing to be updated will shut down, while their workloads transferred to new nodes, without any manual intervention.

A second new feature is called Node Auto-Repair, which automatically fixes nodes that experience performance issues such as disk drive capacity shortages or crashing binaries, Ali said. The feature enables Google Container Engine to monitor node health status and automatically trigger repairs if such problems crop up.

Google has also made architectural improvements to Container Engine that support the new node automation features. “We redesigned our entire upgrade logic with an emphasis on making upgrades as non-disruptive as possible,” Ali wrote.

Meanwhile, Google’s Container Optimized OS, which was previously called Container VM-Image, is now generally available on its Cloud Platform. Container Optimized OS is based on Google’s Chromium OS, and is integrated with the Docker container runtime and Kubernetes orchestration platform. It can be used to run Docker containers on the company’s cloud, Google software engineer Saied Kazemi said in a second blog post.

According to Kazemi, the main benefit of Container Optimized OS is that Google can “control the build, test and release cycles,” thereby providing enhanced kernel features and managed updates for Google Cloud Platform users.

Lastly, Google said it’s making Kubernetes 1.6 available to its customers. The latest version of Kubernetes was released last week, and brings several updates focused on scalability, scheduling and security. The most significant update is that Kubernetes now supports up to 5,000 nodes per cluster, which is around two and half times the previous number. It means organizations can now run some of their biggest workloads on Container Engine, the company said.

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