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Google’s Cloud Platform has just received some new features for developers, including a new Google APIs Client Library for .NET and improved documentation for using third-party Puppet, Chef, Salt and Ansible configuration-management tools.
The new Google APIs Client Library for .NET, which is now generally available from the company, was announced by Dan Ciruli, Google Cloud Platform product manager, in a March 17 post on the Google Cloud Platform Blog.
“This library is an open-source effort, hosted at NuGet, that lets developers building on the Microsoft .NET Framework integrate their desktop or Windows Phone applications with Google’s services,” wrote Ciruli. “It handles OAuth 2.0 integration, streaming uploads and downloads of media and batching requests. For more than 50 Google APIs, it is the easiest way to get access for any Windows developer. Whether you are plugging Google Calendar into your .NET Framework-based application, translating text in a Windows Phone app or writing a PowerShell script to start Google Compute Engine instances, the Google APIs Client Library for .NET can save you tons of time.”
Developers can get more information on using the new library in a Getting Started tutorial, he wrote. Developers can also access the Google APIs Client Library for .NET Blog for more information and tips.
“We strive to make our APIs accessible to anyone on any platform: ReST, HTTP and JSON mean that from nearly any language on nearly any hardware, you can call any of our APIs,” wrote Ciruli. “However, to be truly useful on many platforms, it helps to have a client library—one that packs a lot of functionality like handling auth, streaming media uploads and downloads, and gives you native language idioms.”
Meanwhile, Google Cloud Platform developers who need more details about using configuration-management tools such as those from Puppet, Salt, Chef and Ansible can find useful information in a new Google paper that provides solid tips and details.
The availability of the paper, “Compute Engine Management with Puppet, Chef, Salt, and Ansible,” was announced by Matt Bookman, a Cloud Platform solutions architect, in a March 17 post on the Google Cloud Platform Blog. “The paper helps you understand how resource deployment on Google Compute Engine works, and how you can use open-source software management tools to manage your compute infrastructure,” wrote Bookman.
“Google provides the basic building blocks for Compute Engine resource management with the Compute Engine API and the gcutil command line tool,” he wrote. “However, these are built for resource management rather than software management. As the complexity of your compute infrastructure grows, you may benefit from tools designed for software management.”
To fill those needs, the Puppet, Chef, Salt, and Ansible applications can be adopted as configuration management tools which provide software and resource management, wrote Bookman. “They are open-source and support Google Compute Engine. If your organization already uses one of these tools for managing other systems, we hope to help you get started using it with Google Compute Engine. If you are not already using any of these tools, consider reading Compute Engine Management with Puppet, Chef, Salt, and Ansible as a minimal primer to begin evaluating them.”
Google Cloud Platform Gets New Features Designed to Help Developers
Google is always busy making improvements and advances in its cloud platform components and services for developers. In late October 2013, Google replaced its old Google API Console with a new, expanded and redesigned Google Cloud Console to help developers organize and use the more than 60 APIs offered by Google.
Earlier in October, the company released several technical papers to help cloud developers learn more about the development tools it offers through its Google Compute Engine services. The papers, “Overview of Google Compute Engine for Cloud Developers” and “Building High Availability Applications on Google Compute Engine,” offer insights and details about how the platform can be used and developed for business users.
In September 2013, Google unveiled its second version update of the Google App Engine since August, with the latest release 1.8.4, including a host of features that the company says will make it more flexible and simpler for developers to use for their applications. Included in 1.8.4 is support for Dynamic Web Projects in Eclipse to better support Google Cloud Endpoints and App Engine Backends, as well as fixes for several bugs. One other important new feature is the ability of Google App Engine to handle differential snapshots of a Google Compute Engine persistent disk so that only the most recently changed data is updated.
The August launch of the previous App Engine 1.8.3 was also accompanied by deeper features for Google Compute Engine and the Google Cloud Datastore as the search giant continues to add functions and robustness to the Google Cloud Platform. The new tools included Layer 3 load balancing for Google Compute Engine and improvements to the PHP runtime in the latest Google App Engine release. The Layer 3 load balancing capabilities were a key addition in the Google Compute Engine, to provide Google-scale throughput and fault tolerance to manage Internet applications.