Google on-premises Kubernetes solution enters beta

Google this week announced the beta version of its Cloud Services Platform, an on-premises software product that allows enterprises to deploy Google’s Kubernetes Engine inside their own data centers.

Google announced CSP last July at its Cloud Next conference. Enterprises can build an in-house duplicate of Google’s cloud service to deploy Kubernetes containers to build, test, and deploy, and then move parts or all of it to the public Google cloud, all while managing it with centralized software.

If that sounds familiar, it’s because the competition have similar products. Microsoft has Azure Stack, which lets you run a complete replica of Azure in your own data center and allows you to move apps and services in between your data center and Azure. It has considerable support, too, with Dell EMC, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Cisco, and Lenovo all selling it.

Amazon Web Services (AWS), the pure cloud play, is just now getting the on-prem religion. It recently announced Outposts, a fully managed, AWS hardware configuration that will let customers run AWS compute and storage services on-premises and have full integration with the AWS public cloud.

Since CSP was first announced last year, Google has added CSP Config Management to it to create multi-cluster policies out of the box that set and enforce role-based access controls, resource quotas, and create namespaces. It also allows customers to rapidly deploy their configurations out across all your clusters, both on premises and in the cloud.

CSP Config Management automatically monitors your CSP environment for changes to the approved or acceptable state, blocks unapproved changes, and alerts you to unexpected variations and making policy deployment, security, management, and monitoring easy and universal.

Google has also integrated CSP with Istio, a mesh service that puts a proxy between APIs and applications, providing policy enforcement and offering traffic encryption without having to change your application code.

Google’s move to on-premises solutions

CSP is a part of Google’s strategy to embrace the hybrid cloud. Even though it has been in the cloud game since at least 2008, Google focused on a pure cloud play, like Amazon. But Amazon was the leader, and Google was seen as not taking the enterprise seriously for too long, which resulted in Google being left behind.

Google has shifted gears in recent years to put more emphasis in on-premises support and recognizes that hybrid cloud is the cloud of choice. This is one of several projects around that new strategy.

Another move came this week with its acquisition of Alooma, an Israeli startup that is focused on moving around data between various cloud services and on-premises implementations. It offers a single data pipeline to move data between cloud services like Google’s- BigQuery, AWS Snowflake and Redshift, and Azure.

In a letter on Alooma’s homepage to its customers and partners, the co-founders said, “Joining Google Cloud will bring us one step closer to delivering a full self-service database migration experience bolstered by the power of their cloud technology, including analytics, security, AI, and machine learning.”