The Google Cloud Platform has announced its Container Engine is now production ready, providing the ability to set up a container cluster and manage applications.
The Container Engine is a cluster manager and orchestration system for running Docker containers. It schedules containers into the cluster and manages them automatically based on defined requirements (such as CPU and memory). Container Engine is built on the open source Kubernetes system providing flexibility to take advantage of on-premises, hybrid, or public cloud infrastructure.
With Container Engine, developers can create a managed cluster that’s ready for container deployment, in just a few clicks. Container Engine can help make application management easier as a cluster is equipped with common capabilities, such as logging and container health checking, to give insight into how an application is running. As application needs change, resizing a cluster with more CPU or memory is simple to facilitate.
Since Container Engine is powered by Kubernetes, it facilitates the ability for containers to work together as a single system. Many applications take advantage of multiple containers such as a web application that might have separate containers for the webserver, cache, and database.
Container Engine schedules containers into a cluster and manages them automatically, based on requirements that are declared. Developers have the ability to define 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.
Container Engine features include:
- Fully Managed: Container Engine is fully managed by Google reliability engineers, ensuring a cluster is available and up-to-date.
- Private Container Registry: Google Container Registry makes it easy to store and access private Docker images.
- Scalable: Easily adjust the cluster resources allocated to containers, or the size of a container cluster, as an application's requirements change.
- Docker Support: Container Engine supports the common Docker container format.
- Logging: Enable Google Cloud Logging with a single checkbox, making it easy to gain insight into how an application is running
- Hybrid Networking: Reserve an IP address range for a container cluster, allowing cluster IPs to coexist with private network IPs via Google Cloud VPN.