Google has released more tools to help Microsoft .NET developers access and manipulate resources in Google’s Cloud Platform environment.
The company Sept. 12 announced a new set of Cloud Tools for PowerShell that is designed to let developers script, automate and manage Windows workloads on Google’s cloud platform.
According to Google, the new Cloud Tools allow developers to use the PowerShell command line to control Windows resources, automate common tasks, run scripts for analyzing data and generate reports without having to write custom applications for each task.
The PowerShell update is available free of charge for customers of Google Cloud Platform and can be used to script and automate Windows resources in Google’s Compute Engine, Cloud Storage, Cloud SQL and Cloud DNS environments, said Mete Atamel, developer advocate at Google.
Writing in Google’s Cloud Platform blog, Atamel offered some examples of the kind of things developers will be able to do with the new PowerShell tools in each of the different environments.
For example, against a Google Compute Engine instance, the new PowerShell tools allow developers to create a virtual machine (VM) instance on Compute Engine and to start, stop or restart a VM instance. Similarly, it lets developers add or remove firewall rules and create snapshots of the disk.
With Cloud Storage, the new tools enable developers to create storage buckets on Google Cloud via the PowerShell command line. It lets them list all the storage buckets for a project and the contents of each bucket, as well as add or delete the content in a storage bucket.
The tools enable similar benefits in Google Cloud SQL by, among other things, letting developers establish Cloud SQL instances, and creating failover replicas from the PowerShell interface. Meanwhile, with Cloud DNS, the PowerShell tools enable capabilities like creating managed zones for DNS domains, adding and removing resources, and creating resource record sets, Google said.
Cloud Tools for PowerShell is part of a ramped-up effort by Google to help developers move and manage Windows workloads on the company’s cloud infrastructure. In recent weeks and months, Google has made several other similar announcements. Only earlier this month, for instance, the company released new functionality for managing cloud platform resources from Visual Studio. The company described the tools as enabling a development environment for building and deploying .NET and Windows applications and deploying them to Google Cloud Platform. The company has also released new editions of SQL Server for Google Compute Engine that are designed specifically to handle production workloads in Google’s cloud infrastructure.
Google has previously noted that it wants to make ASP.Net applications “first-class citizens” on its Cloud Platform. The company has said that the support for Windows Server and SQL Server that is currently available on Compute Engine allows enterprises to move their application and SQL Server data more easily to the cloud.
Google has also partnered with cloud migration and disaster recovery provider CloudEndure to help organizations migrate their Windows applications and data to the cloud without having to set up and configure new machines first.