Kubernetes 1.3 on tap for Google Container Engine

Today, we’re announcing that Kubernetes 1.3 is ready to roll out on Google Container Engine (GKE) and will be available to all customers over the coming week. As more businesses bridge their applications and data across on-prem and public clouds, there has been an increased demand for portability and flexibility in deploying applications. The latest Kubernetes 1.3 release addresses many of the top requests from businesses, including services that span availability zones (including on-premises deployments), built-in support for stateful applications and doubling the number of nodes in a cluster to 2,000.

Google Container Engine, a fully managed Kubernetes service, has emerged as one of Google Cloud Platform’s most popular offerings, with usage doubling every 90 days. As our fully managed Kubernetes service, Container Engine is easy to set up, manage and run applications in containers that are backed with Google’s 99.5% SLA. We’ve also made several improvements to Container Engine:

• Integrated Google Cloud Identity & Access Management (IAM) roles, giving you full control and visibility to manage your clusters centrally
• Native local SSD support with automatic provisioning, to quickly and easily deploy your high-throughput applications
• The ability to run different machine types across multiple zones with NodePools, letting you customize your cluster in the way that makes sense for your specific application
• Container-VM Image, an underlying OS for your nodes with advanced security and manageability features for container-based environments, ensuring Container Engine can support business critical applications

• CCP Games adopted the Kubernetes workflow and has saved more than 300 person-hours/year in troubleshooting for EVE Online, allowing their developers to focus on creative work.
• Rayark used Container Engine to launch its newest game, VOEZ, propelling it to the top of the charts in the App Store in Japan. Learn more here.

Partner integrations

• CircleCI added support to Container Engine as an endpoint for CI pipeline
• Shippable replatformed and added full native support for Container Engine clusters (auth, discovery, provisioning and deployment) from the Shippable cloud console
• Citrix introduced its Netscaler CPX Load Balancer that can be configured and deployed to any Container Engine environment
• Datastax released a Solution and Reference Architecture for deploying Datastax Enterprise on Container Engine Clusters (using Cloud Deployment Manager)

Also, if you’d like to participate in the Kubernetes community, we’d love to have you! Please join the google-containers mailing list or on the kubernetes-users or google-containers Slack channels.

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