Google Simplifies Cloud App Deployment With Cloud Launcher

Google has made it easier for business customers to deploy popular software packages on its Google Compute Engine cloud service.

The company Thursday announced Cloud Launcher, a library of more than 120 open-source packages, each of which can be deployed on Google’s Cloud Platform with just a few clicks.

The ready-to-launch packages reduce the need for developers to spend time compiling and configuring applications, finding and deploying libraries, fixing dependencies and resolving versioning issues, Google Cloud Platform Product Manager Varun Talwar said in a blog post.

Google Cloud Launcher

“Cloud Launcher is designed to make developers more efficient, removing operational deployment and configuration tasks so developers can focus on what matters—their application and their users,” he said. “Deployment is incredibly straightforward: users simply select a package from the library, specify a few parameters and the package is up and running in a few clicks.”

Many of the applications in Cloud Launcher are from Bitnami or were configured for easy launch using Google Click to Deploy technology. Bitnami bills itself as an application store for server software packages that are preconfigured to run on internal servers, as virtual machines and in the cloud. The company lists more than 100 applications that it says are packaged and ready to deploy in a variety of environments.

A total of 126 applications are currently listed on Google Cloud Launcher, including nearly two dozen infrastructure applications, several content management tools, developer tools and customer relationship management (CRM) packages. The ready-to-deploy packages include databases such as MySQL and MongoDB, developer tools such as GitLab and Tomcat, and popular content management applications such as WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and JasperReports.

Many of the packages available on Cloud Launcher were designed for and optimized to run on the Google Cloud Platform. Google is working on ensuring the packages are integrated with Google Cloud Monitoring so developers can keep tabs on performance metrics and create custom dashboards for monitoring the applications, Talwar said. Application monitoring support will become available for applications in Cloud Launcher later this spring.

Cloud Launcher is the latest in a series of new features and services that Google has rolled out across its Cloud Platform portfolio in recent weeks. Other announcements include Google Cloud Logging for helping cloud customers manage large volumes of log data and a one-click deployment option for the Puppet configuration management tool on the Google Cloud Platform.

The enhancements are part of an ongoing effort by Google to broaden the appeal of its cloud services among enterprise customers. Google’s cloud revenue has continued to grow steadily in recent years, but the company trails well behind market leader Amazon and somewhat less so with second place Microsoft.

Recent data from market research firm Synergy Research Group showed Amazon’s share of the cloud infrastructure market continuing to expand. For 2014, Amazon Web Services (AWS) accounted for 28 percent of the worldwide market for cloud infrastructure services, followed by Microsoft with 10 percent, IBM with 7 percent and Google in fourth place with 5 percent.

Google, AWS and Microsoft, however, were the only ones among the major cloud service providers to outperform total market growth in 2014, according to Synergy.

Originally published on eWeek.