Google Updates Its Container Services With Focus On Speed, Scaling And Authentication

With its Docker Registry and Container Engine, Google has made a big bet on containers for its Cloud Platform this year. Today, the company is launching updates to both of these services.

The Container Engine, Google’s service for automatically managing clusters to run and orchestrate container deployments, now supports the latest version of Kubernetes (version 1.1). This new version introduces a number of performance improvements and those are now also available to Container Engine users.

This means Container Engine now also features horizontal pod autoscaling (which basically adds more servers to your cluster when needed), as well as an HTTP load balancer that lets developers route traffic to different Kubernetes services based on traffic.

The team also re-architected the networking system with an eye on speed. Google says this work (which introduced native iptables to Container Engine) “virtually eliminates CPU overhead and improves reliability.”

The Google Container registry got a similar range of updates today as well. There, the team added support for the Docker Registry V2 API, improved performance (by up to 40 percent), and added support for advanced authentication. This last feature especially will make life for developers a bit easier because it means they can now more easily integrate the Google Container Registry into their continuous delivery systems like Codeship, CircleCI, Drone, Jenkins, Shippable and Wercker.

Google has also partnered with TwistLock to bring that company’s container security services to its platform. Using this service, Container Registry users on Google’s Cloud Platform can now set up policies for who can access containers, for example.