Posted by Brian Stevens, VP of Product Management

 (Cross-posted on the Google Cloud Platform Blog)

Today, tens of thousands of developers from around the world are joining us at Google Cloud Platform Live — either in person in San Francisco, at our watch parties in New York, Austin, and London, or on the livestream. One of the things we are discussing is that the cloud of today is not yet where developers need it to be. The promise of cloud computing is only partly realized; too many of the headaches of on-premise development and deployment remain. We want to do better. Today, we get one step closer with some important updates to Cloud Platform:

Simple, Flexible Compute Options Development in the cloud today is by and large a fragmented experience. You need to decide up front whether you want to work with virtual machines — and therefore build everything yourself, either from scratch or by wiring together open source components — or to adopt a managed platform, and give up the ability to control the underlying infrastructure. At Google, we think about compute in the cloud differently: as a continuum which allows you to pick and choose the level of abstraction that is right for your application, or even for a component of your application. Today, we’re happy to announce two important steps towards that vision.

Google Container Engine: run Docker containers in compute clusters, powered by Kubernetes
Google Container Engine lets you move from managing application components running on individual virtual machines to launching portable Docker containers that are scheduled into a managed compute cluster for you. Create and wire together container-based services, and gain common capabilities like logging, monitoring and health management with no additional effort. Based on the open source Kubernetes project and running on Google Compute Engine VMs, Container Engine is an optimized and efficient way to build your container-based applications. Because it uses the open source project, it also offers a high level of workload mobility, making it easy to move applications between development machines, on-premise systems, and public cloud providers. Container-based applications can run anywhere, but the combination of fast booting, efficient VM hosts and seamless virtualized network integration make Google Cloud Platform the best place to run them.

Managed VMs in App Engine: PaaS - Evolved
App Engine was born of our vision to enable customers to focus on their applications rather than the plumbing. Earlier this year, we gave you a sneak peek at the next step in the evolution of App Engine — Managed VMs — which will give you all the benefits of App Engine in a flexible virtual machine environment. Today, Managed VMs goes beta and adds auto-scaling support, Cloud SDK integration and support for runtimes built on Docker containers. App Engine provisions and configures all of the ancillary services that are required to build production applications — network routing, load balancing, auto scaling, monitoring and logging — enabling you to focus on application code. Users can run any language or library and customize or replace the entire runtime stack (want to run Node.js on App Engine? Now you can). Furthermore, you have access to the broader array of machine types that Compute Engine offers.


Google Cloud Interconnect: better network connectivity to support global architectures A flexible, high performance and secure network is the backbone of any Internet-scale application or enterprise IT architecture. Today, we’re making it easier for you to get the benefits of Google’s worldwide fiber network by introducing three new connectivity options:
  1. Direct peering gives you a fast network pipe directly to Google in any of over 70 points of presence in 33 countries around the world
  2. Carrier Interconnect enables you to connect to Google with our carrier partners including Equinix, IX Reach, Level 3, TATA Communications, Telx, Verizon, and Zayo
  3. Next month, we will introduce VPN-based connectivity
We’ll follow up with a deeper look at Networking on Wednesday.

Firebase: it’s easier to build mobile and web real-time applications 
Two weeks ago, we announced that Firebase joined Google. Today, we are demonstrating a hint of what makes their platform so powerful. Users of today’s mobile apps are used to real-time flow of communication such as chat, presence, commenting and location. However, current developer tools make it cumbersome to manage the relationship between multiple devices, and the underlying database and storage layer in real time. Google Firebase makes this easier, which is why it powers over 60,000 applications. We’ll follow up with a deeper look at their technology on Thursday.

Google Cloud Debugger: ending printf-style debugging 
At Google I/O, we gave you a sneak peek at how Cloud Debugger makes it easier to troubleshoot applications in production. Today, this service is publicly available in beta. With Cloud Debugger there’s no more hunting through logs to guess at what is going on with your services. Now you can simply pick a line of code, set a watchpoint and the debugger will return locals and a full stack trace from the next request that executes that line on any replica of your service. There is zero setup time, no complex configurations and no performance impacts noticeable to your users.

Google Compute Engine Autoscaler
Today we are launching Compute Engine Autoscaler. It uses the same technology that Google uses to seamlessly handle huge spikes in load and gives developers the ability to dynamically resize a VM fleet in response to utilization and based on a wide array of signals, from QPS of a HTTP Load Balancer, to VM CPU utilization, or custom metrics from the Cloud Monitoring service.

Cloud Platform Free Trial 
New customers can now sign up for a free trial at http://cloud.google.com and receive $300 in credits that you can spend on all Cloud Platform products and services. There are no ongoing commitments — we will never charge your credit card until you upgrade your account. With $300 you can run two n1-standard-2 VMs 24x7 for 60 days, store over 11TB of data, or process over 60TB of data with BigQuery. Learn more about the free trial and start building something for free.

A growing partner ecosystem 
Our Partner Lounge at the SF event features Tableau, Red Hat, DataStax, MongoDB, SaltStack, Fastly and Bitnami. Bitnami announced its Launchpad for Google Cloud Platform featuring almost 100 cloud images, enabling our users to deploy common open source applications and development environments on our infrastructure in one-click. Fastly announced a new offering called Cloud Accelerator, a collaboration with Google Cloud Platform that improves content delivery and performance at the edge.

Rapid adoption 
Over the past months, thousands of new companies have moved to Cloud Platform and adopted it as their development platform of choice. Kevin Baillie took the stage to talk about how Atomic Fiction is able to use thousands of Compute Engine cores to produce high-quality visual effects for Hollywood studios. We also spoke about Wix, one of the most popular consumer website builders, whose media services are built entirely on Cloud Platform. We’re happy to support the launch of their media services platform today. Finally, Office Depot moved its entire printing service from a hosted storage solution to one powered by Cloud Platform — helping them reduce cost, develop with greater agility and power their in-store and online printing service for over 2000 locations.

New price reductions: continued leadership in price-performance
As always, we have an enduring commitment to passing along the savings we receive from Moore’s Law to our users. That is why today we’re announcing price reductions on Network egress (47%), BigQuery storage (23%), Persistent Disk Snapshots (79%), Persistent Disk SSD (48%), and Cloud SQL (25%). These are in addition to the 10% reduction on Google Compute Engine that we announced at the beginning of October and reflect our commitment to make sure you benefit from increased efficiency and falling hardware prices.

A personal note 
I want to end on a personal note. I joined Google just two months ago, and during this time I’ve been floored by what our teams are doing to create the world’s best cloud. We are committed to not just evolving technology for technology’s sake but to staying focused on the user and delivering real value. From what I’ve seen at Google I don’t think the combination of world class technology, innovation and user-focus exists anywhere else in the world today. Today’s announcements are representative of that, and we have so much more in store.