This article was published on June 10, 2014

Google adds Docker image support to App Engine, releases open source container manager and resource usage tools


Google adds Docker image support to App Engine, releases open source container manager and resource usage tools

At DockerCon 2014 today, Eric Brewer, Google’s VP of Infrastructure, announced the company is adding support for Docker images in Google App Engine. He also unveiled two new open source projects: Kubernetes, a container manager, and cAdvisor, a resource usage tool.

When Google Compute Engine hit general availability late last year, the company announced support for Docker, which lets developers build and test an application locally and package everything into a large executable that can then be run anywhere. The company is now taking that one step further by offering a set of extensions that allow App Engine developers to build and deploy Docker images in Managed VMs.

Developers can use the extensions to access the library of Docker images while the Docker community can deploy containers into a completely managed environment. If this sounds like it’s up your alley, you can sign up to give it a shot via this Google Docs form.

Kubernetes is being pitched as “a lean yet powerful” extensible tool for deploying containers into a fleet of machines. It provides health management and replication capabilities, as well as allows containers to connect to one another and the outside world. The source and documentation are available on GitHub, plus a mailing list has been setup to gather feedback for new features and incorporate ideas into Docker.

cAdvisor is supposed to enable “fine-grain” statistics, both instantaneous and historical, regarding resource usage for containers. It can handle nested containers and supports both LMCTFY and Docker’s libcontainer. In fact, because it is written in Go, Google says it hopes it can move some of the tools into libcontainer directly.

Last but not least, Google is making a commitment to open container standards. Brewer has been nominated to Docker’s Governance Committee and says he can work with the community to make containers “the key building block for ‘cloud native’ applications.”

Given that everything at Google is packaged and run in a Linux container, with the company launching more than 2 billion container instances across its data centers every week, we’d say Brewer has plenty of motivation to deliver.

Top Image Credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

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