Google Updates Its Container Engine & Registry

Today Google announced that it is releasing a beta of its Container Engine, which includes new pricing and features. Google is also announcing the general availability of its Container Registry that allows user to store and access container images from a private repository.

Today Google announced that it is releasing a beta of its Container Engine, which includes new pricing and features. Google is also announcing the general availability of its Container Registry that allows user to store and access container images from a private repository.

Containers are changing the way apps are managed and deployed, in most cases making them easier. In order for DevOPs and IT to reap the benefits of containers they need the proper tools. Google Container Engine is an easy way to setup a container cluster and manage applications. All users need to do is define their container’s needs (such as CPU and memory) and Container Engine automatically schedules containers in a cluster and manages them. Users can also move workloads and take advantage of multiple cloud providers.

Google Container Engine Beta features include:

• Create a container cluster in minutes that supports the v1 Release Candidate of Kubernetes (also released today)
• Container Engine manages the uptime of Kubernetes, so it’s always ready to schedule containers
• Google manages updates to the underlying Kubernetes system and offers customers the choice as to when to accept the update.  Users can now run a single command and their container cluster will be upgraded to the latest version.
• If one uses Google Cloud VPN to connect their datacenter to Google, they can reserve an IP address range for their container cluster, allowing the cluster IPs to coexist with private network IPs
• Users can now enable Google Cloud Logging with a single checkbox, making it even easier to gain insight into how the application is running

Users can easily store container images in private and encrypted registries, using Google Container Registry. Users can also push images for free and pull Docker images within Google Cloud Platform region for free.

Container Registry features include:

• Encrypted and Authenticated – Container images are encrypted at rest, and access is authenticated using Cloud Platform OAuth and transmitted over SSL
• Fast – Container Registry is fast and can handle the demands of user’s application, because it is built on Cloud Storage and Cloud Networking.
• Simple – If customers are using Docker, just tag the image with a gcr.io tag and push it to the registry to get started.  Manage images in the Google Developers Console.
• Local – If the cluster runs in Asia or Europe, users can now store images in ASIA or EU specific repositories using asia.gcr.io and eu.gcr.io tags.

Availability and pricing

Both the Google Container Engine Beta and Container Registry are available now. The Container Engine is available at no extra cost to Google Cloud Platform users during its beta run, once out of beta standard clusters start at $0.15/hour. Container Registry only charges user for the Google Cloud Storage storage and network egress consumed by their Docker images.

Google Container Engine Beta

Google Container Registry

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