Technology

The cloud isn&t right for every business, be that because of latency constraints at the edge, regulatory requirements or because itsimply cheaper to own and operate their own data centers for their specific workloads. Given this, itmaybe no surprise that the vast majority of enterprises today use both public and private clouds in parallel. Thatsomething Microsoft has long been betting on as part of its strategy for its Azure cloud, and Google, too, is now taking a number of steps in this direction.

With the open-source Kubernetes project, Google launched one of the fundamental building blocks that make running and managing applications in hybrid environmentseasier for large enterprises. What Google hadn&t done until today, though, is launch a comprehensive solution that includes all of the necessary parts for this kind of deployment. With its new Cloud Services Platform, though, the company is now offering businesses an integrated set of cloud services that can be deployed on both the Google Cloud Platform and inon-premise environments.

As Google Cloud engineering directorChen Goldberg noted in a press briefing ahead of todayannouncement, many businesses also simply want to be able to manage their own workloads on-premise but still be able to access new machine learning tools in the cloud, for example. &Today, to achieve this, use cases involve a compromise between cost, consistency, control and flexibility,& she said. &And this all negatively impacts the desired result.&

Goldberg stressed that the idea behind the Cloud Services Platform is to meet businesses where they are and then allow them to modernize their stack at their own pace. But she also noted that businesses want more than just the ability to move workloads between environments. &Portability isn&t enough,& she said. &Users want consistent experiences so that they can train their team once and run anywhere — and have a single playbook for all environments.&

The two services at the core of this new offering are the Kubernetes container orchestration tool and Istio, a relatively new but quickly growing tool for connecting, managing and securing microservices. Istio is about to hit its 1.0 release.

We&re not simply talking about a collection of open-source tools here. The core of the Cloud Services Platform, Goldberg noted, is &customconfigured and battle-tested for enterprises by Google.& In addition, it is deeply integrated with other services in the Google Cloud, including the companymachine learning tools.

GKE On-Prem

Among these new custom-configured tools are a number of new offerings, which are all part of the larger platform. Maybe the most interesting of these is GKE On-Prem. GKE, the Google Kubernetes Engine, is the core Google Cloud service for managing containers in the cloud. And now Google is essentially bringing this service to the enterprise data center, too.

The service includes access to all of the usual features of GKE in the cloud, including the ability to register and manage clusters and monitor them with Stackdriver, as well as identity and access management. It also includes a direct line to the GCP Marketplace, which recently launched support for Kubernetes-based applications.

Using the GCP Console, enterprises can manage both their on-premise and GKE clusters without having to switch between different environments. GKE on-prem connects seamlessly to a Google Cloud Platform environment and looks and behaves exactly like the cloud version.

Enterprise users also can get access to professional services and enterprise-grade support for help with managing the service.

&Google Cloud is the first and only major cloud vendor to deliver managed Kubernetes on-prem,& Goldberg argued.

GKE Policy Management

Related to this, Google also today announced GKE Policy Management, which is meant to provide Kubernetes administrators with a single tool for managing all of their security policies across clusters. Itagnostic as to where the Kubernetes cluster is running, but you can use it to port your existing Google Cloud identity-based policies to these clusters. This new feature will soon launch in alpha.

Managed Istio

The other major new service Google is launching is Managed Istio (together with Apigee API Management for Istio) to help businesses manage and secure their microservices. The open source Istio service mesh gives admins and operators the tools to manage these services and, with this new managed offering, Google is taking the core of Istio and making it available as a managed service for GKE users.

With this, users get access to Istioservice discovery mechanisms and its traffic management tools for load balancing and routing traffic to containers and VMs, as well as its tools for getting telemetry back from the workloads that run on these clusters.

In addition to these three main new services, Google is also launching a couple of auxiliary tools around GKE and the serverless computing paradigm today. The first of these is the GKE serverless add-on, which makes it easy to run serverless workloads on GKE with a single-step deploy process. This, Google says, will allow developers to go from source code to container &instantaneously.& This tool is currently available as a preview and Google is making parts of this technology available under the umbrella of its new native open source components. These are the same components that make the serverless add-on possible.

And to wrap it all up, Google also today mentioned a new fully managed continuous integration and delivery service, Google Cloud Build, though the details around this service remain under wraps.

So there you have it. By themselves, all of those announcements may seem a bit esoteric. As a whole, though, they show how Googlebet on Kubernetes is starting to pay off. As businesses opt for containers to deploy and run their new workloads (and maybe even bring older applications into the cloud), GKE has put Google Cloud on the map to run them in a hosted environment. Now, it makes sense for Google to extend this to its users& data centers, too. With managed Kubernetes from large and small companies like SUSE, Platform 9, containership is starting to become a big business. Itno surprise the company that started it all wants to get a piece of this pie, too.

Google is hosting its big cloud conference, Google Cloud Next, this morning over at the Moscone center in San Francisco. Obviously itnot quite as large as its flagship event I/O earlier this year, but Googlecloud efforts have become one of its brightest points over the past several quarters.

With heavy investments in Google Cloudinfrastructure, its enterprise services, as well as a suite of machine learning tools layered on top of all that, Google is clearly trying to make Google Cloud a core piece of its business going forward. Traditionally an advertising juggernaut, Google is now figuring out what comes next after that, even as that advertising business continues to grow at a very healthy clip.

The keynote starts at 9 a.m. Pacific time, and the TechCrunch team is on the ground here covering all the newsiest and best bits. Be sure to check out our full coverage on TechCrunch as the keynote moves forward.

To Clark Valberg, the screen is the most important place in the world. And henot the only one who thinks so. It isn&t just tech companies spending their money on design. The biggest brands in the world are pouring money into their digital presence, for many, the first step is InVision.

InVision launched back in 2011 with a simple premise: What if, instead of the back-and-forth between designers and engineers and executives, there was a program that let these interested parties collaborate on a prototype

The first iteration simply let designers build out prototypes, complete with animations and transitions, so that engineers didn&t spend time building things that would only change later.

As that tool grew, InVision realized that it was in conversation with designers across the industry, and that it hadn&t yet fixed one of their biggest pain points. Thatwhy, in 2017, InVision launched Studio, a design platform that was built specifically for designers building products.

Alongside Studio, InVision also launched its own app store for design programs to loop into the larger InVision platform. And the company also launched a fund to invest in early-stage design companies.

The idea here is to become the Salesforce of the design world, with the entire industry centering around this company and its various offerings.

InVision has raised more than $200 million, and serves 4 million users, including 80 percent of the Fortune 500. We&re absolutely thrilled to have Clark Valberg, InVision cofounder and CEO, join us at Disrupt SF in September.

The full agenda is here. Passes for the show are available at the Early-Bird rate until July 25here.