Google Cloud Platform Blog: Deployment Manager is Generally Available

Google Cloud Platform Blog

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

Deployment Manager is Generally Available - Deployments Made Easy

Thursday, August 6, 2015

Google Cloud Deployment Manager makes it easier for you to deploy the cloud resources, such as virtual machines, networks, and storage, necessary to power your applications. Today Deployment Manager is generally available and ready for production usage.
Setting up all the cloud resources for your application can be a daunting task. Once you decide what you need, you want the process for creating them to be easy, repeatable and controlled. This is particularly important if you have multiple developers or administrators that need to set up copies or variations of the same configuration.
Deployment Manager allows you to you specify the resources you want (i.e., declarative), instead of the process to create those resources (i.e., procedural). This allows you to focus on defining what you want to create, not every little deployment step.
Wix, a leading cloud-based web development company with millions of users, has been an early adopter of Deployment Manager and had this to say about their experience.

“Wix Media Group relies on Deployment Manager to create and manage our deployments on Google Cloud Platform. It allows us to easily deploy systems in a variety of locations, provides us with the control we need to roll out new services easily, and gives us the flexibility we need to deploy several versions of our code simultaneously.”

-- Golan Parashi - Infrastructure Technical Lead at Wix Media Group

Deployment Manager Features

Define your infrastructure deployment in a template and deploy via command line or RESTful API
Templates support jinja or python, so you can take advantage of programming constructs, such as loops, conditionals, and parameterized inputs for deployments requiring logic
UI support for viewing and deleting deployments in Google Developers Console
Tight integration with Google Cloud Platform resources from compute to storage to networking, which provides faster provisioning and visualization of the deployments

“A Sample Staging Environment in Asia”

How is Deployment Manager Different?

We’re often asked how Deployment Manager differs from existing open source configuration management systems like Puppet, Chef, SaltStack, or Ansible. Each of these are powerful frameworks for configuration management, but none are natively integrated into Cloud Platform.

Deployment Manager provides a declarative system that allows you to express what you want to run, so that our internal systems can do the hard work of running it for you. Unlike other configuration management systems, Deployment Manager offers UI support directly in Developers Console, allowing you to view the architecture of your deployments. You can take advantage of Deployment Manager to provide the resources and use your existing tools to manage the software. Or move to containers and pre-bake the software configuration in your build step and use Deployment Manager to manage the resources and configure the containers to run. Use the option that works best for you.

Get Started

Because Deployment Manager is natively supported by Cloud Platform, you don’t need to deploy or manage any additional configuration management software, and there’s no additional cost for running it. Take the complexity out of deploying your application on Cloud Platform and try Deployment Manager today. We also welcome your feedback at dep-mgr-feedback@google.com.