Google Expands Cloud Launcher With New Partners

Google’s Cloud Launcher, announced earlier this year, provides businesses with a library of open-source packages that can be deployed on the company’s cloud platform with just a few clicks.

On Oct. 2, the same day that Google formally became part of holding company Alphabet Inc., the company announced that it was expanding Cloud Launcher by collaborating with several new partners to enable similar ease of deployment for commercial tools.

The company’s new Cloud Launcher partners are infrastructure software vendor Zend Technologies, Web performance company Nginx and Expert System, a vendor of information access technologies.

The commercially supported products now available on Google Cloud platform include Zend Server, Nginx Plus, and Cogito API Core from Expert System.

“Easier”

In a statement on Google’s Cloud Platform blog, Andi Gutmans, CEO and co-founder of Zend, described the Google partnership as one that will make it easier for PHP developers to produce enterprise-grade applications in the cloud.

Added to the roster of applications and services now available on Cloud launcher are ASP.Net Framework, Windows Active Directory and several new open-source technologies, such as Open edX, an online courseware development product, and Redmine.

In addition to the new partnerships, Google on Oct. 2 said that it has now also made Cloud Launcher accessible via Google Developers Console. The goal is to give developers a more unified experience by allowing them to find and deploy an application without having to leave the Developers Console, Lee said.

When Google introduced Cloud Launcher in March, it had a total of 128 applications available for easy launch. The list included about two-dozen infrastructure applications, CRM packages, developer tools and content-management software packages. Available in ready-to-deploy mode through Cloud Launcher were products including WordPress, Joomla, GitLab, MongoDB and MySQL.

“Expect more partners and solutions to be added as we expand our inventory of useful open-source and commercial options,” Leslie Lee, Google product manager said in the blog post announcing the latest development.

Meanwhile, in a completely separate development, Google on Friday formally became a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., established as part of plan to streamline operations at the Internet giant.

Going forward, Google will focus purely on its core search, ads, apps, Maps, YouTube and Android businesses. As previously announced, Sundar Pichai will formally take over as Google CEO.

Google’s other business ventures—including Nest, Fiber, Calico, Google Venture, Google Capital and its Google X moonshot projects—will be managed separately under Alphabet.

When Google first announced plans for Alphabet in August, CEO Larry Page described it as a collection of companies, led by Google that would each focus on their specific areas of business.

The newer Google will be slimmed down, with businesses that are far afield of Google’s core Internet search business being contained under Alphabet instead, Page had noted.

“Fundamentally, we believe this allows us more management scale, as we can run things independently that aren’t very related,” he had said in a blog posting after announcing the reorganization.

Under the new structure, Page and Google co-founder Sergey Brin have committed to hiring what they have described as strong CEOs to run each of the separate businesses under Alphabet and to fund each business sufficiently.

Originally published on eWeek.