Google announces general availability of its Container Engine

Google has taken its Google Container Engine out of its alpha phase and made it generally available and production ready. "Backed by Google’s 99.5 percent service level agreement, Container Engine makes it easy for you to set up a container cluster and manage your application, without sacrificing infrastructure flexibility," Craig Mcluckie, Product Manager, wrote in his blog post.

With Container Engine, users can create a managed cluster that’s ready for container deployment, "in just a few clicks."

It also makes application management easier.

[caption id="attachment_1327651" align="alignleft" width="380"] Representational image. Reuters[/caption]

The cluster is equipped with common capabilities, such as logging and container health checking, to give users insight into how their application is running.  And, as application’s needs change, resizing the cluster with more CPU or memory is easy.

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"Many applications take advantage of multiple containers; for example, a web application might have separate containers for the webserver, cache, and database.  Container Engine is powered by Kubernetes, the open source orchestration system, making it easy for your containers to work together as a single system," Craig added.

Container Engine schedules users' containers into their cluster and manages them automatically, based on requirements that they declare.

"Simply define your containers’ needs, such as the amount of CPU/memory to reserve, number of replicas, and keepalive policy, and Container Engine will actively ensure requirements are met," Google said.

Most customers live in a multi-cloud world, using both on-premises and public cloud infrastructures to host their applications.  With Red Hat, Microsoft, IBM, Mirantis OpenStack, and VMware integrating Kubernetes into their platforms, users will be able to move workloads, or take advantage of multiple cloud providers, easily.