Google Cloud at KubeCon EU: New projects, updated services, and how to connect

It’s that time of the year again, when we get excited about all things cloud-native and gear up to connect, share and learn from fellow developers and technologists at KubeCon EU 2022. Here is a quick round up of the latest news from the Google open source and Kubernetes teams, and how to connect with us this week at the event. 

Google’s continued commitment to the open-source community

For over 20 years, Google has helped define the state of computing with it’s commitment to open source. Google originated Kubernetes and supported the evolution of the project since contributing it to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) in 2015. Kubernetes became central to cloud-native computing because it was open sourced and under the governance of a neutral body. Since then, we’ve continued to invest deeply in cloud-native open source technologies on behalf of our customers. Most recently we completed the transition of Knative to the CNCF and announced our intent to contribute Istio to the organization, which alongside Kubernetes and Knative, is a critical part of cloud-native infrastructure. We continue to support the evolution of these projects and will be hosting KnativeCon at KubeCon EU, where you can learn more about the project and how you can join the community to help it grow further. 

Building new capabilities for critical workloads in the cloud

Kubernetes has been a transformative technology, bringing cloud-native best practices and design patterns to a number of industries. Yet AI/ML, batch, and HPC workloads have lagged behind traditional enterprise counterparts primarily due to the complex scheduling and resource allocation needs that make it difficult to deploy and scale these scientific workloads. 

Google, along with a number of community members, is working to make Kubernetes a first-class platform for these workloads through improvements to the batch API, improving scheduling performance, and leading the development of kueue, a Kubernetes-native work queue. Combined with Google Cloud's leading hardware and autoscaling capabilities, these upstream efforts make Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) an ideal platform for AI/ML and batch computing. To learn more about how Google is helping to add these critical capabilities into the project you can join us at Batch and HPC Day and Kubernetes AI Day onsite during KubeCon. 

Driving Kubernetes ease of use for customers through new open source projects

We are embedded in open source communities, and believe in the power of the community to drive innovation and make it easier for everyone to build in the cloud. This week we reached an important milestone with a new open source offering from Google: Config Connector and Config Sync are now available as open source (Config Connector , Config Sync), joining Gatekeeper. Now, the entirety of Anthos Config Management is based on open source. We’ve also added Config Sync and the new package orchestrator to the kpt project. Together, these projects provide an end-to-end portable solution that enables a “What You See Is What You Get” configuration authoring, automation, and delivery experience, simplifies managing Kubernetes platforms and KRM-driven infrastructure at scale. We are seeking help from the community to innovate with us on this project, as we hope that it can help improve how others build platforms on top of Kubernetes. We are happy to accept contributions to kpt from the community and our customers. You can check out more information here on how to get involved as this project grows.

Adding a high-usage tier to Managed Service for Prometheus

This March, we introduced Google Cloud Managed Service for Prometheus, and Kubernetes users are enthusiastic about the monitoring service’s ease of use and scalability. To get a sense of why customers are using it, you can read about the experience of Maisons du Monde, a French furniture and home decor company that adopted Managed Service for Prometheus after first running the open source version.

In fact, Managed Service for Prometheus' scalability is so strong that we’ve introduced a new high-usage tier designed for customers with extremely large volumes of metrics — more than 500 billion metric samples per month. This new pricing tier is 50% less than the previous highest-tier list price. We’ve also reduced the list price of lower-usage tiers by 25%. To get started with Managed Service for Prometheus, try out our new Managed Service for Prometheus qwiklab at no charge now through June 15, and join us on Tuesday at KubeCon for the presentation: Easy, scalable metrics for Kubernetes with Managed Service for Prometheus.

The most automated and scalable managed Kubernetes

Kubernetes is not just a technology — it's a model for creating value for your business, a way of developing apps and services, and a means to secure and develop cloud-native IT capabilities for innovation. Given our long history with Kubernetes we are able to offer unparalleled managed services based on critical open source projects. Created by the same developers that built Kubernetes, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) leads the way in cloud-based Kubernetes services for running containerized applications. GKE makes it easy to recognize the benefits of innovation initiatives without getting bogged down troubleshooting infrastructure issues and managing day-to-day operations related to enterprise-scale container deployment. With fully managed Autopilot mode of operation combined with multi-dimensional auto scaling capabilities, GKE delivers most dimensions of automation to efficiently and easily operate your applications. Only GKE can run 15,000 node clusters, outscaling other cloud providers by up to 10X, letting you run applications effectively and reliably at scale.

At KubeCon you will have direct access to our Kubernetes experts, starting on May 17th at our co-located event: Build with the most automated and scalable Kubernetes hosted by Google Cloud. Join us to learn what is new in the world of containers and Kubernetes here at Google Cloud and get access to technical demos.

More ways to engage with Google expertise at KubeCon EU

Explore several interesting courses to help get you started with Kubernetes by visiting our virtual booth. This includes some top sessions produced in the Learn Kubernetes with Google video series and an opportunity to claim exclusive swag to support your Kubernetes learning from Google Cloud. You can also join over 25 sessions from Googlers onsite at the event. 

Kubernetes builds on more than 15 years of running Google's containerized workloads and the invaluable contributions from the open source community. Have a question? Curious about the latest things in Google Cloud or want to talk to Kubernetes experts? Join us virtually on the CNCF slack in the #6-kubecon-googlecloud channel! There will be a number of Google Cloud and cloud-native open source community members available to field your questions. You can also request some time with our team on the ground.We are looking forward to connecting with developers and sharing expertise from some of our top Kubernetes experts this week at the event.