Google Cloud Services Platform Brings the Cloud On Premises
Google is extending its Cloud Platform beyond the confines of its own data centers, enabling organizations to run its Cloud Services Platform on-premises.
The Cloud Services Platform (CSP) is available in beta as of Feb. 20, providing organizations with the ability to run Google cloud workloads on their own hardware infrastructure and manage it in a unified approach with workloads running in the public cloud. CSP is a Kubernetes based platform and brings the Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) on-premises for organizations to run container workloads. Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration system that was originally built by Google and is now developed by a multi-stakeholder community at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).
“No one argues about the benefits of the cloud, but when customers move to the cloud, they recognize, and we at Google also recognize, that it’s going to be a journey for them to move to the cloud and it will take time,” Chen Goldberg, Director of Engineering, Container Engine and Kubernetes at Google, told eWEEK. “So what we hear from customers is that while they are moving to the cloud, still 90 percent of workloads are on premises.”
Goldberg emphasized that CSP is all about Google embracing the hybrid cloud model, where organizations have cloud assets both in the public cloud and on-premises, providing freedom of choice for the most appropriate deployment model.
With the regular version of GKE that runs on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Kubernetes is already setup and mostly ready to run, with just a few configuration options from users. For GKE On Prem as part of CSP, the setup is a little more involved, though Goldberg said that Google still does all the “heavy lifting’ for users. CSP in its initial beta configuration runs on top of VMware vSphere 6.5 as the core software infrastructure.
“We provide an environment that allows you to a provision a cluster and manage it from on premises and from GKE so you get a single pane of glass,” she said.
