Container orchestration products are becoming extremely important for companies that have embraced modern software development principles, and Google updated its take on this market Wednesday with support for a project that’s near and dear to the company’s heart.
Google Container Engine now runs Kubernetes 1.7, which was released late last month. Google thinks it is the first company to update its commercial container orchestration service to the new version of Kubernetes, which was developed internally at Google and released to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation in 2015.
Kubernetes is a bit of a darling among forward-thinking software engineers in 2017, but it is a complicated beast; we’ve covered several startups over the past few months dedicated to making Kubernetes easier to use. Once they’ve deployed Kubernetes — which is hard enough — Google Cloud Platform customers tend to opt for Google Container Engine in order to manage ongoing activities associated with maintaining Kuberneters clusters, said Arpana Sinha, group product manager for Container Engine, such as scaling to meet increased demand or repairing containers when things go wrong.
Google also feels that Container Engine offers a more secure container-orchestration experience because it runs an operating system based on Chromium, which is also the basis for Chrome OS. It added to that security angle Wednesday with several new features that ensure different nodes in a Kubernetes cluster operate independently and encrypt traffic flowing between nodes, Sinha said.
