Everyone likes to deploy software on the cloud. It's quick, it's easy, and it's cheap. But, if you're new at deploying applications to the cloud, it still can be tricky. That's where Google wants to help, and get your business, with its new Cloud Launcher program for the Google Compute Engine.

According to a Google blog post, Cloud Launcher offers "you a continuum of compute options -- from high performance VMs and container-based services to managed PaaS -- so you can choose the most suitable option."

With the Google Cloud Launcher, you can launch more than 120 popular open-source packages. These programs have been configured by Bitnami, a company that provides a one-click install library of popular server applications and development environments and Google Click to Deploy, Google's own set of easy-to-setup programs.

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The Cloud Launcher makes it simple to find which program you want to set up as well. You can either search for them or look at the offerings by category.

Google claims that "deployment is incredibly straightforward: users simply select a package from the library, specify a few parameters and the package is up and running in a few clicks." Indeed, a quick check found that it was easy to set up applications. In addition, Cloud Launcher tells you before you start running what processors you'll get, how much disk space your app will take up, and how much you can expect to pay for your new Google Cloud Platform every month.

What's attractive about this offer is that instead of burning IT hours setting up and configuring all the underlying runtime components and package, your developers and operators can spend their their time on design and writing code.

Cloud Launcher is about more than just pre-packaged programs such as WordPress, Drupal, or a Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Python/Perl (LAMP) stack. It also includes developer tools and stacks such as Apache Solr, Django, Gitlab, Jenkins, LAMP, Node.js, Ruby on Rails, and Tomcat.

Google claims:

"Many of these packages have been specifically built and performance-tuned for Google Cloud Platform, and we're actively working to ensure these packages are well integrated with Google Cloud Monitoring so you can review health and performance metrics, create custom dashboards and set alerts for your cloud infrastructure and software packages in one place. This will roll out to all supported packages on Cloud Launcher this spring."

If you've been considering using the Google Compute Engine for your software-as-a-service cloud provider, Google has just made it about as easy to try as it can possibly be done.

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