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In case you missed it in January: Cloud pricing, complex business challenges in the cloud and our new series unpacks containers
Friday, January 30, 2015
A new year has come and gone, and we’ve wasted no time in putting our New Year’s resolutions to work. Take a look at what the Google Cloud Platform team has been up to in the month of January.
Digging into containers
Containers continue to be a hot topic across the software development universe, including here at Google. In fact, two of Google’s open source projects –
Kubernetes
and
cAdvisor
– center on containers and how they are run in clusters; and both projects were
named Open Source Rookies of the Year
by Black Duck Software this month.
To keep you up to speed, we launched a blog series diving into the technology and explaining the new paradigms. For a primer, start with “
An introduction to containers, Kubernetes, and the trajectory of modern cloud computing
.” In a nutshell, the post explains what a container provides that a VM does not. Read the piece to see why this matters, and see the relationship between single-instance containers,
Docker
(an open platform for distributed applications),
Kubernetes
(clusters of intelligently managed containers), and
Google Container Engine
(containers-as-a-service hosted on Google).
If you’re looking to dive deeper into the world of containers and Google’s rationale for creating Kubernetes, read “
What makes a container cluster
,” which talks about the ingredients of a greater container cluster manager and the benefits of running containers in large-scale clusters, and “
Everything you wanted to know about Kubernetes but were too afraid to ask
.”
And we weren’t just talking about containers this month. Following on the launch of the alpha version of
Google Container Engine
in November at Google Cloud Platform Live, we announced the beta release of
Google Container Registry
, a new service that’s designed to provide secure and private Docker image storage on Google Cloud Platform.
Demystifying cloud pricing
Speaking of hot topics, this month we also unpacked a topic that tops the list: pricing. Pricing is a critical consideration for users trying to make the best decision about infrastructure systems design, but it’s also complex and sometimes cloudy (pun intended). Learn what exactly you get for your money through an analysis of
Google Cloud Platform pricing compared to Amazon Web Services
.
Tech tips on tips: Dataflow Big Data pipelines, verify MongoDB backups, diagnose bottlenecks..
.
A few other tech tips and other tidbits you may have missed in the past month:
Run Dataflow Big Data pipelines everywhere, thanks to Cloudera
Automate MongoDB backup validation jobs on Google Compute Engine
Use Google Cloud Monitoring to help gain insight into application performance
Diagnose service performance bottlenecks with Google Cloud Trace, which was introduced at Google I/O 2014
Run Hadoop tasks more seamlessly than ever on the cloud with Hortonworks Data Platform
Deploy Elasticsearch, a tool for searching and analyzing large volumes of data
From genomics to website design: how to’s with our customers
The true benefit of this quickly evolving cloud technology really shines through in our customer stories. This month, we heard from customers spanning industries and geographies, including:
Alacris Theranostics
, a Berlin-based spin-off of the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics is using Google Cloud Platform to better match cancer patients with the most promising drug therapies.
Aucor
, based in Finland, transitioned customer websites onto Google Cloud Platform, providing them the capacity to scale with their expanding customer base and focus on what they do best: design awesome websites.
Shine Technologies
, a digital consultancy based in Australia, uses
Google BigQuery
to help businesses make sense of the billions of ad clicks, ad impressions and other data that guide business decisions.
Aerospike
, an open-source NoSQL database based here in Mountain View, pushes the limits of
Local SSD
technology to offer blazing performances: fully 95% of local SSD reads complete in under 1 ms. In fact, benchmarks show that Aerospike delivers a 15x price advantage in storage costs with Local SSD compared with RAM.
New year, new series: Introducing the Learn with Google Cloud Platform Webinar Series
We’ve kicked off a monthly webinar series featuring use cases and real-time Twitter and Google+ Q&A sessions to pull back the curtain on solving complex business challenges in the cloud and nurturing business growth. This month’s
webinar
discussed how high-growth online retailer zulily leveraged big data to offer a uniquely tailored product and customer experience to a mass market around the clock.
It’s been an exciting month, and February promises to bring more discussion of container clusters and more tips, news and stories from the cloud. Stay tuned, and Happy Friday!
-Posted by Charlene Lee, Product Marketing Manager
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