Introducing Service Directory: Manage all your services in one place at scale

Enterprises rely on increasing numbers of heterogeneous services across cloud and on-premises environments. Google Cloud customers, for example, may use services like Cloud Storage alongside third-party partner services such as Snowflake, MongoDB, and Redis, as well as their own company-owned applications. Securely connecting to and managing these multi-cloud services can be challenging, especially as resources need to scale up and down to meet fast changing business needs.

Customers want to be able to take a service- rather than infrastructure-centric approach to connecting to Google Cloud services, their own applications, and third-party partner services from GCP Marketplace. Service Directory is a new managed solution to help you publish, discover, and connect services in a consistent and reliable way, regardless of the environment and platform in which they are deployed. It provides real-time information about all your services in a single place, allowing you to perform service inventory management at scale, whether you have a few service endpoints or thousands.

Simplify service management and operations

Service Directory reduces the complexity of management and operations by providing unified visibility for all your services across cloud and on-premises environments. And because Service Directory is fully managed, you get enhanced service inventory management at scale with no operational overhead, increasing the productivity of your DevOps teams. At the same time, advanced permission capabilities let you ensure that only the correct principals (users and applications) are able to update this information or look up services, freeing service developers from worrying about accidentally impacting other services.

Connecting hybrid and multi-cloud services at scale

With Service Directory, you can easily understand all your services across multi-cloud environments. This includes workloads running in Compute Engine VMs, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), as well as external services running on-prem and third-party clouds. It increases application reachability by maintaining the endpoint information for all your services. Service Directory lets you define services with metadata, allowing you to group services, while making your endpoints easily understood by your consumers and applications. Customers can use Service Directory to register different types of services and resolve them securely over HTTP and gRPC. For DNS clients, customers can leverage Service Directory’s private DNS zones, a feature that automatically updates DNS records as services change. 

Let’s connect

For more on Service Directory, check out this video. Click here to learn more about GCP’s networking portfolio and reach out to us with feedback at gcp-networking@google.com.