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Google is making it simpler for organizations to connect Kubernetes application clusters to Google’s suite of cloud platform services.
The company has released a new services framework that includes the Kubernetes Service Catalog and the Google Cloud Platform Service Broker hosted service. The catalog provides a collection of Google Cloud Platform Services available to Kubernetes applications while the service broker component provides a way to easily connect to them.
To get started all that organizations have to do is to install the Kubernetes Service Catalog in an existing Google-hosted Kubernetes container cluster or an on-premises cluster. The Service Catalog then uses the hosted Service Broker to provide organizations with access to Google cloud services such as Cloud Storage, Cloud SQL, BigQuery and Cloud Pub/Sub.
“This design makes it easy for you to use the environment that you are familiar with to create service instances and connect to them,” said Chris Crall, Google product manager in a blog April 26. The framework allows administrators to create a service instance and to enable secure application access to the service using just two commands, Crall said.
Both, the Kubernetes Service Broker and Service Catalog are based on open source Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that make it easier for organizations to incorporate the service framework into their existing application environment, he said.
The service broker component for instance is based on the Open Service Broker API project that gives developers and software vendors a way to enable services access for applications running on Kubernetes, Cloud Foundry and other cloud native platforms.
“You don’t need to know how to create or manage the services to use them in your application,” Crall noted.
Kubernetes is an open source platform for deploying, scaling and, managing containerized applications and services. The technology originally belonged to Google but was released to the open source community in 2014. According to its official description, Kubernetes orchestrates the computing, networking and storage infrastructure required to run native cloud application workloads.
The big benefit of the new services framework is that it eliminates the need for enterprise cloud administrators to have any specialized knowledge for connecting their Kubernetes application environments to cloud-based services. Administrators no longer have to worry about how the services are built or about the infrastructure needed to run them, Crall said.
Organizations will be able to access the new Kubernetes service catalog via the Google Cloud Console user interface over the next few days. Google will add more services to service broker in coming weeks and months, Crall said without offering any specifics.
Google Cloud Platform Service Broker is currently available as a beta release. Organizations that use the technology in its current form will not be covered by any of the standard service level agreements that accompany a product in general release.