Posted by Greg Demichillie, Director of Product Management

(Cross-posted on the Google Cloud Platform Blog.)

At Google Cloud Platform, we strive to deliver innovative cloud computing technology to developers at low costs with massive scale. Currently, our cloud offerings are powered by best-in-class data centers, virtualization software and container-based applications, but as we consider the future of cloud computing, we realize there’s a major opportunity ahead that would allow us to deliver an unprecedented improvement in the power, efficiency and reliability of our infrastructure. We can elevate cloud computing like never before.

We’re answering the question that’s been in front of us the whole time: why isn’t cloud computing built in actual clouds? Well, as of today, it is. We’re excited to announce Google Actual Cloud Platform: all of our incredible services and products running in actual clouds in the troposphere.

Starting on April 1, Google Actual Cloud Platform brings with it a number of exciting new features:

  • New compute zone: We’ve added a new compute zone, troposphere-1a, to make it easier than ever to provide your app with non-earth-bound availability. Now, you no longer have to make a choice between high availability and high altitude.

  • New machine types: Alongside our current machine types, we’ve added a new category of “physical” devices: actual-cloud machine types. Choose from cumulus-16gb, cirrus-32gb and stratocumuliform-64g (created specifically for data intensive workloads).

  • Stormboost: Drawing on charges from electrical fields during thunderstorms, we’re able to supercharge read/write performance on all persistent disks and offer 50% higher IOPS.

  • CloudDrops: A new, game-changing content distribution system. CloudDrops can provide blazingly fast content delivery to all of your users using—you guessed it—rain drops.

  • Weather Dashboards in the Developer’s Console: With new weather-dependent performance features, you need a way to monitor the atmospheric conditions of your servers. Now, you can monitor humidity/request, watch your app’s altitude and see a 7-day forecast right next to the rest of your stats.

  • Bare-metal container support: Applications deployed on Actual Cloud Platform can run in containers too. The lightweight shared kernel model of containers makes them ideal for non-terrestrial deployments.

From all of us on the Google Cloud Platform team, here’s to clear skies ahead.