User Review
( votes)From Google Cloud’s Anthos on bare metal to the new serverless Database Migration Service, CRN breaks down some of the No. 3 cloud computing provider’s top products and services to follow this year.
Google Cloud Tools- Google Cloud, riding a digital transformation wave that’s been accelerated by the coronavirus pandemic, continues to push out new products and services reflecting its multi-cloud and industry-specific strategy.
Recent new tools include bare metal and telecommunications industry-geared variations of its hybrid and multi-cloud Anthos platform that allows customers to build and manage applications across their on-premise data centers, Google Cloud Platform and competitors’ clouds. Google Cloud also continues to push out new database capabilities with Cloud SQL Insights and the serverless Database Migration Service announced in November.
The No. 3 cloud provider finished 2020 with $13.05 billion in cloud revenue from its Google Cloud Platform services and Google Workspace collaboration tools, representing 46.6 percent year-over-year. Its future contract backlog grew to $30 billion in the last quarter, up from $19 billion.
Here’s a look at some of the hottest Google Cloud tools to watch in 2021.
VM Manager
VM Manager, introduced in late January, is a cloud-native suite to secure and manage large virtual machine (VM) fleets running the Windows and Linux operating systems on Compute Engine, Google Cloud’s computing and hosting service that allows users to create and run VMs on it infrastructure.
VM Manager has one dashboard to increase compliance visibility and real-time tracking of inventory data. Its patch, configuration and inventory management tools are designed to drive efficiency through automation and reduce the operational complexity of maintaining the VM fleets.
Patch management keeps VMs up to date and helps protect systems from vulnerabilities by allowing users to apply on-demand and scheduled patches. It also enables patch compliance reporting in a customer’s environment.
Configuration management allows users to deploy, query and maintain consistent configurations for their VM instances. Its automated remediation actions reduce manual efforts to keep fleets compliant. Inventory management is used to collect and reviewing operating system information. It’s integrated with Google Cloud’s Cloud Asset Inventory to simplify viewing, monitoring and analyzing fleet data.
Cloud SQL Insights
Cloud SQL Insights, also launched in January, provides database observability for developers.
Developers get a single, intuitive user interface for self-service, application-centric – rather than query-centric — monitoring and diagnosis to help them quickly understand and resolve database performance issues on Cloud SQL, Google Cloud’s fully managed relational database service. Insights currently is available for Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL at no additional cost for a user’s last seven days of metrics.
Google Cloud said it designed the serverless Insights using open standards, “with world-class visualizations and with modern architectures such as microservices in mind.” Insights provides database metrics and end-to-end tracing through the open-standard OpenTelemetry observability framework and the Cloud Monitoring and Cloud Trace APIs, with a full-stack view of environments from application through database, according to Google Cloud. It also uses SQLcommenter, an open-source library that auto-instruments object relational mappers to help identify which application code is causing problems.
