Containers are changing the way that people deploy and manage applications. Today, we are announcing the beta release of Google Container Engine , including pricing information and new features that give you more control of your container cluster. We’re also announcing that Google Container Registry is generally available, allowing you to easily store and access your container images from a private repository.





Container Engine beta: New features and pricing information

While containers make packaging apps easier, DevOps and IT administrators need better tools to unlock the promise of containerization. Container Engine makes it easy for you to set up a container cluster and manage your application. Simply define your containers’ needs, such as CPU and memory requirements, and Container Engine schedules your containers into your cluster and manages them automatically. Also, because it’s built on Kubernetes , the open source container orchestration system, you can move workloads or take advantage of multiple cloud providers.



"Container Engine unlocks the power of Google infrastructure for our startup, without locking us in. It gives us peace of mind for infrastructure, and lets us focus on writing great software." - Brian Fitzpatrick, Founder & CTO, Tock

"Container Engine and Kubernetes helped us go from one deployment, with an hour downtime a week, to 8 zero-downtime deployments a day."

Frits Vlaanderen, Systems Engineer, Travix

New features give you more control of your container cluster:





Create a container cluster in minutes that supports the v1 Release Candidate of Kubernetes (also released today)

Container Engine manages the uptime of Kubernetes, so it’s always ready to schedule your containers

We manage updates to the underlying Kubernetes system and offer you the choice as to when you accept the update. You can now run a single command and your container cluster will be upgraded to the latest version.

If you use Google Cloud VPN to connect your datacenter to Google, you can reserve an IP address range for your container cluster, allowing your cluster IPs to coexist with private network IPs

You can now enable Google Cloud Logging with a single checkbox, making it even easier to gain insight into how your application is running





During the beta, you will continue to pay no additional charge for Container Engine above the underlying Google Cloud Platform resources you use. Starting at general availability, we will have two levels of pricing for Container Engine:





Standard clusters will be charged $0.15 per hour. A standard cluster can be comprised of up to to 100 virtual machine nodes and Google will manage the cluster availability for you.

Basic clusters allow you to try Container Engine on up to 5 virtual machine nodes. Upgrading to standard is easy, if you want managed uptime. Under our current promotion, we don't charge you extra to use basic clusters, but we may start charging for them in the future.





To learn more about pricing, check out our Container Engine pricing details .





Announcing Google Container Registry General Availability

Google Container Registry helps make it easy for you to store your container images in a private and encrypted registry, built on Cloud Platform. Pricing for storing images in Container Registry is simple: you only pay Google Cloud Storage costs. Pushing images is free, and pulling Docker images within a Google Cloud Platform region is free (Cloud Storage egress cost when outside of a region).





Container Registry is now ready for production use:





Encrypted and Authenticated - Your container images are encrypted at rest, and access is authenticated using Cloud Platform OAuth and transmitted over SSL

Fast - Container Registry is fast and can handle the demands of your application, because it is built on Cloud Storage and Google Cloud Networking .

Simple - If you’re using Docker, just tag your image with a gcr.io tag and push it to the registry to get started . Manage your images in the Google Developers Console.

Local - If your cluster runs in Asia or Europe, you can now store your images in ASIA or EU specific repositories using asia.gcr.io and eu.gcr.io tags.





Here’s what customers, who are using Container Registry in production, are saying:







“We’ve loved using Container Registry since we started with containers and Kubernetes last fall. It’s easy to forget how valuable it is, because it just works.”

Steve Reed, Principal Software Engineer at zulily







"Container Registry is a critical component in our move to a containerized deployment environment. It provides a simple environment for staging our Docker containers that gives us confidence they are secure and safe from tampering."

Dave Tucker, Vice President of Engineering, Workiva



“Container Registry allows our developers to create private repositories inside our projects' existing security settings to efficiently deploy our code in private, pre-built containers. At this scale, saving time on deployment saves money. Having very high speed network between Container Registry and compute instances is critical to begin processing our data on thousands of instances in seconds rather than minutes.”

Tim Kelton, Co-Founder, Descartes Labs



“The killer feature for Google Container Registry is the performance. Hands-down fastest to push and pull images.”

Avi Cavale, CEO & Co-Founder, Shippable



Get Started

To try out Container Engine, visit our site and documentation . And if your team has feedback and would like to work with us, please sign up here . To learn more about Container Registry, visit the documentation or provide feedback here . Together, Container Engine and Container Registry will enable you to unlock the promise of containerization.



