Google made a number of cloud-related announcements during their Google Cloud Platform Live Event that is taking place in San Francisco these days. The most important is the availability of Google Container Engine (GKE), currently in public alpha. Others are: Managed VMs, more connectivity options, Cloud Debugger, Autoscaler, and price reductions.
With GKE Google is externalizing a cluster management solution that was developed for their own data center needs. GKE enables users to manage logical clusters of Google Compute Engine (GCE) resources, including Kubernetes for automating Docker container deployment on cluster’s nodes. GKE automates both the process of provisioning, running and stopping VMs and the process of deploying a containerized application on a variable number of Docker containers based on demand. Containers can communicate with each other or the outside world through Andromeda 1.5 virtual network. GKE also provides monitoring, logging and health management services.
In order to create and manage GCE resources -clusters, pods, controllers, services- one can use a Web API, the gcloud CLI, or the Developers Console.
Applications deployed on GKE can be moved partially or completely to another cloud provider.
Each cluster has a master and in this alpha version up to 50 nodes running the same VM type. GKE runs Kubernetes 0.4.2. Because it is an alpha version, Google is charging just for the regular GCE resources, and not for using GKE.
Another announcement made by Google is the availability of Managed VMs as beta. Unlike standard virtual machines, the user has the possibility to configure these VMs and applications running on them are not subject to the constraints of the GAE sandbox, but are still managed by Google and can access the usual services. Managed VMs comes with auto-scalability, support for Docker containers and Cloud SDK.
Google is diversifying the connectivity options:
- Direct Peering – direct connection to Google’s network backbone through 70 PoP in 33 countries
- Carrier Interconnect – connection via a partner
- VPN
Another service announced by Google was Cloud Debugger public beta. This enables users to see the state –local variables and full stack trace- of a Java application running on GAE without setting up logging. There are two conditions: the app runs in a Managed VM and the source code is available in a Cloud Repository.
Compute Engine Autoscaler is also made available in beta. It can be used to manage load spikes, being configurable based on CPU usage, serving capacity or various monitoring metrics.
The last announcement that we are covering is a price reduction on several services: Network egress (47%), BigQuery storage (23%), Persistent Disk Snapshots (79%), Persistent Disk SSD (48%), and Cloud SQL (25%).