Google Launches Mobile App For Managing Cloud Resources

Google has released a new application that company officials said will allow IT administrators to manage applications running on Google’s Cloud Platform using their mobile phones.

The new Google Cloud Console mobile application is currently only on Android but will soon be available for iOS users, as well.

Google Cloud Platform product manager Stewart Fife described the application as one that will let administrators use their mobile devices to view the overall health of their cloud hosted applications. It lets them view projects, set alerts, keep tabs on billing, and monitor the status of Google’s cloud platform resources.

Key statistics

The application lets administrators monitor key statistics, such as the total number of instances for Google App Engine apps that may be running at a particular time, the number of requests per second and the number of errors per second.

For applications on Google Compute Engine virtual machines, administrators can use the new application to monitor CPU usage and manage disk and network status. The application can be used even to restart virtual machines or to initiate a secure shell session into them so administrators can perform routine administrative and other system-level tasks. “You can also respond to incidents, so your team knows you’re on top of the issue,” Fife said.

The new application continues a long string of announcements and updates that Google has been making to its cloud platform technologies over the past few months in an apparent effort to garner more interest from enterprises.

The announcements have been varied and appear largely designed to bolster the ability of enterprises to deploy, administer and manage workloads on Google’s cloud platforms.

For example, earlier this year, the company announced a new Cloud Launcher capability designed to let businesses deploy more than 120 popular open-source packages with a single click. A Google Cloud Logging feature announced in March gave businesses the ability to centralize and manage Google Compute Engine and Google App Engine logs from one console.

In a sort of prelude to this week’s announcement, Google in January announced beta availability of a new cloud monitoring service designed to give businesses the ability to monitor the performance, uptime and capacity of Google’s Apps Engine, Cloud SQL database technology and its Compute Engine platform.

Such enhancements are considered vital for Google as it jostles for market space alongside rivals like Microsoft and Amazon, both of whom have a larger presence in big businesses than Google does. Analysts have previously noted how, from a pure cloud technology standpoint, Google’s cloud platform compares favorably with that from rivals.

However, the one area where analysts say the company has some catching up to do is around the support and management capabilities for its cloud technologies.

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Originally published on eWeek.