Pivotal Cloud Foundry is now generally available to run on Google Cloud Platform.
This means enterprises can now build, deploy, and run cloud-native apps on the same infrastructure that powers Google Search, Google Maps, and YouTube.
The news marks a major milestone, buttressing the multi-cloud promise Cloud Foundry has espoused for years. This promise has one explicit goal: ensure easy portability of Cloud Foundry deployments across many different providers. Add Google Cloud Platform to that list.
Ecosystems thrive on choice and diversity, the market collectively yawns at vanilla, me-too players. That’s why we’ve observed providers compete for enterprise Cloud Foundry workloads based on their unique infrastructure, differentiating capabilities, and ideas on how to extend the platform. Right on cue, Google Cloud Platform has delivered in several important ways.
One highlight: the GCP service broker for PCF. This allows access to several of Google’s data products (like BigQuery and Cloud Machine Learning platform), so it’s easy to consume these services natively with Pivotal Cloud Foundry.
Google Cloud Platform’s scale and innovation, plumbed through Cloud Foundry. That’s the combination many have been waiting for, and it’s available now. Interested in what a production deployment looks like? Check out Google’s handy reference architecture and admin guidelines for PCF.
Let’s take a deeper look at how Pivotal Cloud Foundry and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) combine to offer breakthrough capabilities for the enterprise.
So Innovative, It’s Practical
Since the launch of Google Cloud Platform in 2011, CIOs have dreamed of helping their enterprise “run like Google” on the back of these innovative technologies. Now, Pivotal gives them another way to capitalize on what Google has built.
Hundreds of the world’s largest companies use Pivotal Cloud Foundry, the leading open source platform for cloud-native apps for mission critical, production workloads. Pivotal Cloud Foundry has become the default, opinionated pattern with the Global 2000.
These organizations can capitalize on Google’s mastery of distributed systems in many ways. But Cloud Foundry just might be the most familiar one; it’s a great place for an enterprise to start.
Pair Programming With Googlers? Yes, Please!
It’s no secret that Pivotal engineers have worked side-by-side with Google’s team over the last several months to bring Cloud Foundry to GCP.
By the end of the year, you’ll be able to consume Google data services natively on @pivotalcf. @jjhollywood to @wattersjames #springone #s1p
— Bridget Kromhout (@bridgetkromhout) August 3, 2016
A very cool culmination of one workstream was Google’s live “open-sourcing” of the Cloud Foundry service broker repo during Cloud Foundry Summit Europe:
Live action open source with @ccbriant at #CFSummit! https://t.co/jsFkoXrOci
— Eric Johnson (@erjohnso) October 5, 2016
Here are 7 reasons why the move to cloud-native just got easier, thanks to Pivotal and Google.
1. Mammoth Scale Made Massively Easy.
GCP’s services are externalizations of the infrastructure that runs their consumer products like Maps, Search, and YouTube. Global scale is an inherent part of Google Cloud Platform’s infrastructure.
What does that mean for the enterprise? Take your Pivotal Cloud Foundry deployment global with ease! Just use Google’s HTTP(s) Load Balancer (check out the Github repo, with scripts and manifests for a multi-regional deployment of Cloud Foundry). And since GCP’s load balancer functions at Google scale, the service can scale apps to over a million requests in seconds without pre-warming.
2. Precision Insight with Breakthrough Data & Analytics.
The service broker for GCP makes many of GCP’s unique data services available to developers through Cloud Foundry, including:
- Google BigQuery—a fully managed, petabyte scale, low cost analytics data warehouse
- Google Cloud Storage—object storage
- Google Cloud SQL—a MySQL database service, fully managed
- Google Cloud Pub/Sub—real-time messaging between independent applications
- Google Cloud Vision API—image recognition based on Google’s image recognition model
- Google Cloud Speech API—convert audio to text, in over 80 languages
- Google Cloud Natural Language API—infer meaning and structure from text
- Google Translate API—translation between thousands of language pairs
You might ask, can’t I use the service broker for GCP even if I’m running on another IaaS? Sure, but why? To voluntarily introduce latency into your apps? Maybe the idea isn’t ludicrous for some asynchronous scenarios, but you will get the best experience running this particular service broker when running compute on GCP.
The Cloud Foundry service broker, a highly structured tool, helps developers connect their applications with other services—it’s a hugely popular pattern, and other open source projects are adopting it.
For more on services brokers and how they work, check out the documentation.
3. Speed Thrills.
Ever marvel at the responsiveness of Google’s services? It turns out, they have their own network, and it’s as well-engineered as you might expect!
Google’s backbone network has thousands of miles of fiber optic cable, uses advanced software-defined networking and has over a 100 edge locations to deliver fast, consistent and scalable performance.
Case in point: Google recently announced it’s co-building the Pacific Light Cable Network (PLCN), a 12,800 km trans-Pacific submarine cable system that will provide the first direct fiber optic path between Los Angeles, California (USA) and Hong Kong with ultra-high capacity transmission.
The edge locations merit a closer look. If a request is bound for a Google target—and it hits one of the edge locations—the request is detected and then travels the Google backbone the rest of the way, bypassing other more crowded routes. After the request is processed, Google sends the response back along the most optimized path.
Your Pivotal Cloud Foundry apps, running on Google, can now benefit from this scale, performance, and availability. Keep employees and customers engaged with responsive digital experiences that capitalize on this lightning-fast routing and throughput.
4. Security at Scale.
We urge our customers to think differently about security. You can’t keep bad actors out of your systems. You have to outrun them by going faster, and outsmart them by rethinking the security model for your applications and their dependencies. Pivotal strives to provide a platform that’s “secure by default.”
What’s Google’s approach to security? Let’s start with scale. Google employs more than 500 full-time security and privacy professionals, who take part in research and outreach activities to protect the wider community of Internet users, as well as organize and participate in open-source projects. This investment in security shines through in Google’s cloud infrastructure, as detailed in this whitepaper.
Security will always be a shared responsibility, but I’m not sure you could have better partners than Pivotal and Google in this area.
5. Stop Giving Money to Your Competitor.
One early trend of our joint go-to-market efforts: retailers show keen interest in running Pivotal Cloud Foundry on GCP. The unique data and analytics features suit many workloads and retail scenarios. But Cloud Foundry Foundation CEO Sam Ramji touched on another angle in a recent interview:
“Companies who compete with Amazon and run their digital business on AWS are taking substantial risk. [Amazon CEO] Jeff Bezos has made it clear that “your margin is our opportunity” and his company gets real-time indicators of other companies’ activities on AWS. Network traffic load, compute intensity, and growth of storage correlate with business progress. Recently, Amazon starting to compete with a longtime customer, Maersk—one of the largest shipping companies in the world—by starting Amazon’s Shipping unit. Does it make sense for Maersk to continue to pay their competitor to capture their business data?”
What a great point! In 2012, retailers had one compelling option. But the IaaS market has matured. Retailers have options in 2016, and they don’t have to choose the IaaS that also happens to have its sights on their core business.
6. Price & Performance.
Benchmarking cloud providers remains a cottage industry. With different instance sizes, underlying hardware specs, and constant price drops, IT managers wonder if they get the most bang for their IaaS buck. RedMonk, an analyst firm stocked with some of the smartest folks around, updated their IaaS pricing survey in August. One finding of note:
“Google remains the most aggressively priced, offering more memory per dollar spent across each of their instances.”
Check out the full survey, along with RedMonk’s assumptions and methodology.
The results confirm what many savvy cloud buyers already know. With Google’s breakthrough pricing models, customers can get great value:
- Save up to 30% with sustained use discounts for long running virtual machines
- Save up to 80% with preemptible Virtual Machines for applications that can handle virtual machine restarts
Both pricing features come into play with Pivotal Cloud Foundry. BOSH gives customers the freedom and flexibility to structure a PCF deployment to keep IaaS costs to low, so you can invest up the stack in your apps where it matters.
7. True to Multi-Cloud.
Why should a customer continue to use a given Cloud Foundry IaaS target? Google’s answer from SpringOne Platform 2016 resonated with us:
We couldn’t have said it better. Google aims to win and keep customers happy on the strength of their IaaS differentiation and unique service broker features. Thanks to Cloud Foundry, your provider is no longer an antagonist—the customer is always in the driver’s seat!
Here, Let Me Google That For You
Interested in Pivotal Cloud Foundry on GCP? You can search for it…or you can read a bit more about how we’re working together to help enterprises accelerate their digital transformation. Then, download a trial version of Pivotal Cloud Foundry to install in your GCP account. Make sure to check out the documentation as well.
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