Category Archives: Google Cloud Platform Blog

Product updates, customer stories, and tips and tricks on Google Cloud Platform

Partnering to bring Windows workloads to Google Cloud Platform

By Chris Sells, Product Manager

We work with a growing ecosystem of partners across all of our products and features to make sure that you have the help and advice you need from the consultants and product companies you work with. And, we provide our partners with extensive training to make sure that they know the right way to work with Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

This is a program that we’re always expanding, which is why this week at Google Cloud Next '17 we announced the availability of the Windows Partner Program.

With our increased support for Windows workloads on the technical side, we know that GCP is joining a larger Windows and .NET ecosystem. Part of that is working with top system integrators in the Windows community to make sure that they’re ready to help GCP customers take the best advantage of our platform with new and existing Windows and .NET apps and services. Towards that end, we’ve certified the following partners for Windows on GCP.

Featured Windows Partners


Together with its clients, Capgemini creates and delivers business, technology and digital solutions that fit their needs, enabling clients to achieve innovation and competitiveness.
With hundreds of .NET developers and certified engineers in GCP, CI&T is a go-to global partner for companies in the Microsoft stack seeking to benefit from GCP’s availability, security and price points.

From strategic planning to technical execution, Magenic creates new applications using Microsoft .NET and other platforms for any channel and modernizes existing applications to run optimally on GCP.

For a dive into Magenic’s guidance on bringing your existing ASP.NET apps to GCP, check out Using Google Cloud to Host .NET Applications and How to Lift-and-Shift a Line of Business Application onto Google Cloud Platform.
Neudesic consultants bring business and technology expertise together, offering a wide range of cloud- and data-driven solutions, including custom application development (.NET and beyond), comprehensive managed services and business software products.
SADA Systems provides managed services to clients with a holistic approach to provide ongoing monitoring and support for the implementation of Windows on GCP. SADA is also a Microsoft National Solutions provider and offers premium support for Windows platform.

GCP is a great place for Windows/.NET

With the Windows Partner Program, we’ve gathered together top support to help you take best advantage of Windows on GCP.

Welcome Kaggle to Google Cloud

By Fei-Fei Li, Chief Scientist, Google Cloud AI and Machine Learning

San Francisco — Today, I’m excited to announce that Kaggle will be joining Google Cloud. Founded in 2010, Kaggle is home to the world's largest community of data scientists and machine learning enthusiasts. More than 800,000 data experts use Kaggle to explore, analyze and understand the latest updates in machine learning and data analytics. Kaggle is the best place to search and analyze public datasets, build machine learning models and grow your data science expertise.

During my keynote talk at Next ‘17, I emphasized the importance of democratizing AI. We must lower the barriers of entry to AI and make it available to the largest community of developers, users and enterprises, so they can apply it to their own unique needs. With Kaggle joining the Google Cloud team, we can accelerate this mission.

Kaggle and Google Cloud will continue to support machine learning training and deployment services, while offering the community the ability to store and query large datasets.

I’m thrilled to welcome Kaggle to the team. Kaggle and Google Cloud will foster a thriving community of machine learning developers and data scientists, giving them direct access to the most advanced cloud machine learning environment.

I can’t wait to see what machine learning problems you solve and the breakthroughs you achieve.

Reimagining support for Google Cloud Platform: new pricing model and partnerships

By Dave Rensin, Director, Customer Reliability Engineering and Benjamin Smith, Director, Engineering Support, Google Cloud

San Francisco — Cloud customers need a flexible and responsive relationship with their providers. We’ve taken a close look at how we offer support and today are announcing a new model, as well as partnerships with Pivotal and Rackspace, to deliver a closer and more effective way to engage with customers.

When you move to the cloud you’re choosing to bet your business on that platform. The way we see it, this relationship is more than just a typical ‘customer/vendor’ dynamic; it’s a partnership, especially when it comes to support. We started down this path last year when we launched Customer Reliability Engineering (CRE) based on the principles of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), but we always knew that it was just the first step.

Engineering Support: new role-based model


Support is part of the overall product experience, and we think it should be tailored to your unique technical needs. We’re announcing the all new Engineering Support, a role-based subscription model that allows us to match engineer to engineer, so we can meet you where your business is, no matter what stage of development you’re in.

We know you don’t have just one project or team. We know you're constantly shifting engineers around as software development projects move from concept to development to production. With this in mind, we took a look at support and asked: Why should you be forced to pick just one support plan for your whole company? Why should you be locked into paying for a multi-year support contract? Why should you pay more for support as you spend more on the platform? If we’re doing our jobs, then you should spend less over time.

In rethinking our approach, and after listening to the feedback from customers, we focused on three principles:

  • Predictability - Flat fees per user per month; no variable percentage-of-platform-spend charges; You should know on day one what your costs will be on day 30.
  • Customizability - You should be able to configure your support entitlements to match the exact needs of your business.
  • Flexibility - You should be able to change the level of support from month-to-month as the unique needs of your business evolve.

With Engineering Support, we’ll offer three choices per support seat:

  • Development engineering support is ideal for developers or QA engineers that can manage with a response within four to eight business hours, priced at $100/user per month.
  • Production engineering support provides a one-hour response time for critical issues at $250/user per month.
  • On-call engineering support pages a Google engineer and delivers a 15-minute response time 24x7 for critical issues at $1,500/user per month.

With this new model, you pay for only the roles your team needs and can decide what time-frame of support responses best suits the lifecycle stages of your applications and who in your organization needs to interact with support.

The advantages of the Engineering Support model are:
  • You can mix and match your support levels and spend to the stages of development maturity for your projects. You can add, remove or change support levels monthly, from our Cloud Console. No more buying the highest tier for the whole company just because one project needs a 15-minute response time.
  • Prices are fixed so you know on the first day of the month what your support bill will be on the last day of the month. No more of the dreaded “success tax” where your support bill increases with cloud usage.
  • You can make adjustments month-to-month as your needs evolve, changing your support needs with shifts in your business.

Our goal is for Engineering Support to eventually replace the “precious metal” (e.g., silver, gold) tiers that link support costs directly to cloud usage. We're aiming to roll out Engineering Support with new customers this spring. We’ll also work with our existing customers to move them to the new model over the course of the year.

And, there's an option to not pay for support at all. As always, we support every customer for quota increase requests and billing questions at no cost. Further, forums, communities, issue lists and product documentation are accessible by all, 24x7.

Watch for more info soon at cloud.google.com/support.

Pivotal Cloud Foundry first CRE partner

We support our customers’ needs to use the mix of cloud services that is best for their business. And since we launched the CRE program, we’ve known that it’s important to have an ecosystem of technology partners to extend this mix. So we’re excited to announce that we’ve brought on Pivotal as our first CRE technology partner.

CRE technology partners will work hand-in-hand with Google to thoroughly review their solutions and implement changes to address identified risks to reliability. Additionally, we'll continuously work with our CRE partners to ensure that the partner solution’s configuration, architecture and conventions allow users to create highly reliable and available applications that are in line with CRE’s best practices.

We’re working closely with Pivotal to make sure that GCP customers who choose to use Pivotal Cloud Foundry can feel comfortable that they’re going to build and deploy highly reliable systems by default.

Rackspace Support for GCP

To ensure our customers are covered beyond our own support teams, we’re partnering with Rackspace to offer managed support for GCP. The Rackspace team is actively building their GCP practice, and we are providing them with the resources and tools they need to deliver the best experience to our joint customers.

Our goal is to make GCP the best choice for Rackspace customers looking to move to cloud by creating a high level of integration and experience. Rackspace already has Google Certified Professionals on staff, and expects to begin onboarding beta customers for GCP managed support in the coming months.

Visit us at Next

If you're at Google Cloud Next '17 this week, please stop by The Fifth Nine lounge to learn more about SRE and DevOps. We’re hosting some great sessions including SRE War Stories, where panelists will discuss memorable SRE events in Google history, talks by customers and partners, and a fireside chat with SRE creators Benjamin Treynor Sloss and Ben Lutch. See you there!

Join us at Next, right now

By Alex Barrett, Editor, Google Cloud Platform blog

If you’re reading this blog post, stop right now and head over to the livestream of the Google Cloud Next '17 keynote, featuring Diane Greene, Senior Vice President of Google Cloud; Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google; Eric Schmidt, Chairman of Alphabet and Fei-Fei Li, Chief Scientist for Google Cloud Machine Learning. We promise you’ll be glad you did.
After this morning’s keynote ends, we’ll kick off over 200 breakout sessions, where Googlers, customers and partners will discuss new, efficient and exciting ways of using Google Cloud technologies, including Google Cloud Platform (GCP), G Suite, Maps APIs and mobile.

If you’re at the show, be sure to check out the show floor and Sandbox, an interactive show-floor experience that showcases the amazing things you can build with Google Cloud technology.
And stay tuned to this channel for breaking news and announcements. Until then, enjoy the show!

Google Cloud Container Builder: a fast and flexible way to package your software

By David Bendory, Tech Lead and Software Engineer and Christopher Sanson, Product Manager, Google Cloud Container Builder Team

At Google everything runs in containers, from Gmail to YouTube to Search. With Google Cloud Platform (GCP) we're bringing the scale and developer efficiencies we’ve seen with containers to our customers. From cluster management on Google Container Engine, to image hosting on Google Container Registry, to our contributions to Spinnaker (an OSS release management tool), we’re always working to bring you the best, most open experience for working with containers in the cloud.

Furthering that mission, today we're happy to announce the general availability of Google Cloud Container Builder, a stand-alone tool for building container images regardless of deployment environment.

Whether you're a large enterprise or a small startup just starting out with containers, you need a fast, reliable, and consistent way to package your software into containers as part of an automated workflow. Container Builder enables you to build your Docker containers on GCP. This helps empower a tighter release process for teams, more reliable build environment across workspaces and frees you from having to manage your own scalable infrastructure for running builds.

Back in March, 2016, we began using Container Builder as the build-and-package engine behind “gcloud app deploy” for the App Engine flexible environment. Most App Engine flexible environment customers didn’t notice, but some who did commented that deploying code was faster and more reliable. Today we’re happy to extend that same speed and reliability to all container users. With its command-line interface, automated build triggers and build steps — a container-based approach to executing arbitrary build commands — we think you’ll find that Container Builder is remarkably flexible as well.

We invite you to try out our “Hello, World!” and to incorporate Container Builder into your release workflow. Contact us at [email protected] or by using the “google-container-registry” tag on Stackoverflow and we look forward to your feedback.

Interacting with Container Builder

REST API and Cloud SDK

Container Builder provides a REST API for programmatically creating and managing builds as well as a gcloud command line interface for working with builds from the CLI. Our online documentation includes examples using the Cloud SDK and curl that will help enable you to integrate Container Builder into your workflows however you like.

UI and automated build triggers

Container Builder enables two new UIs in the Google Cloud Console under Container Registry, build history and build triggers. Build history shows all your builds with details for each including logs. Build triggers lets you set up automated CI/CD workflows that start new builds on source code changes. Triggers work with Cloud Source Repository, Github, and Bitbucket on pushes to your repository based on branch or tag.

Getting started: “Hello, world!”

Our Quickstarts walk you through the complete setup needed to get started with your first build. Once you’ve enabled the Google Container Builder API and authenticated with the Cloud SDK, you can execute a simple cloud build from the command line.

Let’s run a “Hello, World!” Docker build using one of our examples in GitHub. In an empty directory, execute these commands in your terminal:

git clone \
    https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/cloud-builders.git
cd cloud-builders/go/examples/hello_world_app
gcloud container builds submit --config=cloudbuild.yaml .

This last command will push the local source in your current directory (specified by “.”) to Container Builder, which will then execute your build based on the Dockerfile. Your build logs will stream to the terminal as your build executes, finishing with a hello-app image being pushed to Google Container Registry.

The README.md file explains how to test your image locally if you have Docker installed. To deploy your image on Google App Engine, run this command, substituting your project id for <project-id>:

gcloud app deploy \
    --image-url=gcr.io/<project-id>/hello-app app.yaml

Using the gcloud container builds submit command, you can easily experiment with running any of your existing Dockerfile-based builds on Container Builder. Images can be deployed to any Docker runtime, such as App Engine or Google Container Engine.

Beyond Docker builds

Container Builder is not just a Docker builder, but rather a composable ecosystem that allows you to use any build steps that you wish. We have open-sourced builders for common languages and tasks like npm, git, go and the gcloud command line interface. Many images on DockerHub like Maven, Gradle and Bazel work out of the box. By composing your custom build steps, you can run unit tests with your build, reduce the size of your final image by rebaking your built image onto a leaner base image and removing build and test tooling and much more.

In fact, our build steps will let you run any Docker image as part of your build, so you can easily package the tools of your choice to move your existing builds onto GCP. While you may want to package your builds into containers to take advantage of other GCP offerings, there's no requirement that your build produce a container as output.

For example, here’s a "Hello, world" example in Go that defines two build steps in a cloudbuild.yaml: the first step does a standard Go build, and the second uploads the built application into a Cloud Storage bucket. You can arbitrarily compose build steps that can do anything that you can do in a Docker container.

Pricing

Container Builder includes 120 free build minutes per day per billing account. Most of our alpha program users found they were able to move their builds onto Container Builder in that time allotment at no cost. Over 120 minutes, builds cost $.0034 per minute. For full details on pricing and quota limitations, please see our pricing documentation.

A community view: what’s top of mind at Google Cloud Next ’17

By Jo Maitland, Blogs and Social Media Lead, Google Cloud

Our annual ritual of inviting thousands of customers, partners, developers, IT pros, industry analysts and press to join us for three days of learning about Google Cloud has arrived. This week we'll open the doors to Google Cloud Next '17, and I can tell you, you're in for a tremendous show.

But instead of sharing what I’m excited about, here's a sampling of opinion from people in the community who are coming to Next.

Amanda Folson, Develooper Advocate and Community Lead, GitLab

"The market is moving so fast that keeping tabs on it is tough when there’s so much going on. Google popped up overnight and is doing some very innovative work. As far as sessions go, I want to hear what Vint Cerf and Marc Andreessen have to say in their fireside chat on the past and future of enterprise computing. They’ve had a little bit to do with the internet! My company’s focused on orchestration and managing the lifecycle of code, so I’ll be attending sessions on Kubernetes, Docker and anything on DevOps. It’s where everything is headed."
Krish Subramanian, SVP of Products and Strategy, CloudMunch

"I’m interested in finding out about enterprise companies adopting Google Cloud as well as the traction Google is seeing for machine learning. I want to see what’s in store to attract more devs to the service. Another trend I’m watching closely is serverless — I’ll be interested to learn how Google Cloud Functions stacks up against AWS Lambda."
David Mytton, Founder and CEO, Server Density

"We’ve been gradually migrating our systems over to GCP from IBM Softlayer. We are big advocates of handing off management of infrastructure to Google’s cloud services instead of wrangling it ourselves. We recently migrated our time series database to Google Cloud Bigtable. I’ll be giving a talk on this migration on March 8. I’m looking forward to meeting other GCP customers and learning about new products. Providing feedback one to one with specific Google teams is also really valuable."
Alex Williams, Founder and Editor-in-chief, The New Stack

"I am looking forward to learning more about how how Google views the next generation of data centers in the context of software development across multiple cloud infrastructures . . . be they customer infrastructures or those offered by competitors. . . We are curious about the evolution of APIs as they become more important for companies as a way to reach more third-party developers. This larger story about APIs is particularly pertinent when considering new "serverless" style architectures. It's in this realm that we see the intersection of machine learning and connected systems evolving. We'll be looking for proof points of this evolution when speaking with Google developers and engineers as well as customers and conference attendees. I am also hoping to get a deeper understanding of the way Google views open source ecosystems."
Simone Brunozzi, CTO, MosaixSoft

"1) Kubernetes vs. everything else
2) Machine Learning tools"


Weird. Nobody mentioned the open bar and catching up with old friends!

See you there, or on the livestream!

A new issue tracker for Google Cloud Platform

By Kasia Derc-Fenske, Technical Solutions Engineer Manager, Google Cloud and Jesse Scherer, Technical Program Manager, Google Cloud Platform Support


Starting today, we’re working on facilitating better collaboration between you and the Google Cloud Platform product teams, by upgrading to Issue Tracker, a tool we also use internally at Google. We have migrated all issues from the old code.google.com tracker to the new Issue Tracker hosted at issuetracker.google.com.

Left: Google Code issue tracker, right: new Google Issue Tracker 

Getting started with Google Issue Tracker should be easy. Check out our documentation for more information about how to create, edit, search and group issues. By default, Google Issue Tracker only displays issues assigned to you, but you can easily change that to show a hotlist of your choice, a bookmark group or saved searches. You can also adjust notification settings by clicking the gear icon in the top right corner and selecting settings. For more information, check out the discussion of notification levels in the developer documentation.
The Google App Engine open issues saved search

GCP team wants your feedback!

Starring an issue shows us you're interested in getting it fixed/implemented — please take advantage of this feature. It also allows you to quickly view all issues you starred.

Searching for product-specific issues

Opening any code.google.com issue link will automatically redirect you to the new system. You’ll be able to find all of the issues from code.google.com in the Issue Tracker, including any issue you've reported, commented on or starred. If you feel like anything is missing, let us know (how meta!) — we have backups available!

Issue Tracker organizes issues into a component hierarchy. Starting at the Cloud Platform component, you can drill down to a particular product's issues. And because each product (and some product features) have their own component, you can easily search for them. For example, you can view all Google App Engine or Google Compute Engine issues, which correspond to the old tracker’s full issue list for App Engine and Compute Engine. You can find links to each product's issues in our support documentation. To search within those issues, leave the component ID in the search bar; removing it will search public issues from all Google products.

For detailed instructions on how to create issues check out this guide, Still have questions? Take a peek at our FAQ. If you can’t find the answer please let us know by commenting on this post.

Please continue helping us improve our products by reporting issues and feature requests!

Collaborating with Coursera to address the cloud skills gap

By Louise Byrne, Head of Cloud Training Delivery, Google Cloud

As more and more companies wish to take advantage of what cloud computing, data analytics and machine learning can do for their businesses, the gap between the knowledge needed to move to the cloud and the demand for such skills has grown enormously. Lack of expertise and cloud skills is often cited as the top challenge for companies wishing to migrate their business to the cloud.

To address this need, we’re collaborating with Coursera, a leading online education platform, to launch a series of on-demand Google Cloud Platform training offerings. Developed and taught by Google experts, these courses range in skills levels from beginner to advanced and include topics like cloud fundamentals, operations, security, data analytics and machine learning. Now with just a few clicks anyone in the world can get trained on Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

This collaboration is part of our ongoing effort, including our recent acquisition of training platform Qwiklabs, to provide learning experiences to customers in the ways that work best for them, be that the classroom, on-demand or a blended version of the two. In addition to Coursera, we are also working with a global network of instructor-led classroom training providers.

Visit the Coursera/Google catalogue to start learning today and watch for more courses and specializations this year. We're working with Coursera to add to the course catalogue in the coming months.

Partnering on open source: Google and HashiCorp engineers on managing GCP infrastructure

By Eric Johnson, Engineering Manager

Earlier in January, we shared the first episode of a video mini-series highlighting how the Google Cloud Graphite team is making open source software work great with the Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Today, we’re kicking off the next chapter of the series, featuring HashiCorp’s open-source DevOps tools and how to use them with GCP.

HashiCorp open source tools simplify application delivery, helping users provision, secure and run infrastructure for any applications. We kick off the series with a high-level overview, featuring Kelsey Hightower, Staff Developer Advocate for GCP, and Armon Dadgar, CTO and co-founder of HashiCorp.


Then, for our next installment, we show HashiCorp and GCP in action. Imagine a small, independent game studio working on its next title — a retro 1980s style arcade game updated for multiplayer and playable over the web. Watch as the team engages in collaborative development, demos the game to their CEO and deploys it for public release. Along the way, we feature:
  • Vagrant, which allows developers to create repeatable development environments to be used by any member of a team without consulting operators. Vagrant can easily spin up remote VMs on Google Compute Engine and allows developers shared access to the same VM — ideal for collaborative development.
  • Packer, which with a single configuration file, produces machine images for many target environments, including Compute Engine. The ease with which Packer images can be easily described and built make it an ideal fit with DevOps concepts such as immutable infrastructure and continuous delivery.
  • Terraform, which helps operators safely and predictably create, modify and destroy production infrastructure. It codifies APIs into declarative configuration files that can be shared amongst team members, treated as code, edited, reviewed and versioned. Operators can thus manage GCP resources spanning many products — key when provisioning scalable production infrastructure.
Join us on YouTube to watch other episodes that will cover topics including using machine images to deploy or using infrastructure as code to manage resources. Follow Google Cloud on YouTube, or @GoogleCloud on Twitter to find out when new videos are published. And stay tuned for more blog posts and videos about work we’re doing with open-source providers like Puppet, Chef, Cloud Foundry, Red Hat, SaltStack and others.

No-cost VM migration to Google Cloud Platform now available with CloudEndure

By Brian Stark, Product Manager Google Cloud Platform

When Google Cloud meets with large customers, it’s clear they're managing years of investment in on-prem tools and applications — many of them still mission-critical. One of the most common questions we field is how to get the cost, performance and innovation of cloud using the talent and tech they have today.

We're committed to a seamless transition to the cloud, and in an effort to facilitate our customers’ journeys, we’re collaborating with CloudEndure, a cloud migration and disaster recovery provider, to offer a no cost, self-service migration tool for Google Cloud Platform (GCP) customers.

The joint CloudEndure/GCP VM Migration Service allows you to migrate virtual machines and physical servers from their existing environment — whether the source machines are on-prem or already in the cloud — into GCP with near-zero downtime and little to no disruption. The service is offered at no charge, although customers may incur costs for the machines created as well as ephemeral helper instances that orchestrate the migration.

We’ve prepared a tutorial for you on how to use the new CloudEndure migration service here. We’ve also created a webinar that will air March 2 (and on-demand thereafter) that details the solution’s full benefits. We look forward to seeing you in the cloud!