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Google's hybrid offering Cloud Services Platform available in beta

With the vast majority of workloads still on premise, Google Cloud is focused on bringing the cloud to customers with solutions like GKE On-Prem.
Written by Stephanie Condon, Senior Writer
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Google on Wednesday announced the beta availability of Cloud Services Platform, its platform for building and managing services both on premise and in the cloud. First announced at last year's Google Next conference, CSP offers services such as GKE On-Prem, a managed Kubernetes service for the remote lifecycle management of on-prem clusters. The software-based platform can run on existing hardware and allows customers to integrate existing networking, storage, and identity capabilities.

The hybrid offering is a significant move from Google in a year when the cloud computing market will have a decidedly multi-cloud, hybrid spin. As ZDNet's Larry Dignan notes, the infrastructure-as-a-service wars have been largely decided, with the spoils going to Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and GCP. Yet the hybrid shift by players such as IBM, which is acquiring Red Hat, could change the cloud landscape.

SEE: Top cloud providers 2019: AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud; IBM makes hybrid move; Salesforce dominates SaaS

Investing in hybrid solutions is a critical part of Google Cloud's strategy this year, according to Chen Goldberg, director of engineering for Google Cloud. Google has already invested in hybrid management solutions like Apigee, and it's rolled out services like Dedicated Interconnect, which offers a private connection for companies that need to extend their corporate network to the cloud.

"We want to make sure our customers are successful and can move fast and transform their business with their existing environments and existing constraints," she said. "This is our North Star."

For businesses adopting hybrid cloud strategies, Goldberg said, "the biggest challenge is integration between systems in existing environments and flexibility between on prem and in the cloud, and making sure the same people can manage and move from on prem to the cloud if they choose to."

CSP addresses those challenges, she said.

With Stackdriver Monitoring and Istio policy management capabilities, customers get a single management console spanning on-prem and the cloud. Meanwhile, customers can use the GCP Marketplace to find enterprise-ready, open-source, and commercial Kubernetes applications featuring prebuilt deployment templates, simple licensing, and consolidated billing.

Google is also enhancing CSP with CSP Config Management, which lets customers create multi-cluster management policies, such as role-based access controls and resource quotas. Customers can deploy configurations across all of their clusters, both on prem and in the cloud.

Google announced that KeyBank, one of the largest banks in the US, is using CSP. In a statement,  KeyBank CTO Keith Silvestri said the platform "provides us the security we need, the portability we want, and the productivity that our developers crave."

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