An update on container support on Google Cloud Platform

Cross posted from the Google Cloud Platform Blog

Everything at Google, from Search to Gmail, is packaged and run in a Linux container. Each week we launch more than 2 billion container instances across our global data centers, and the power of containers has enabled both more reliable services and higher, more-efficient scalability. Now we’re taking another step toward making those capabilities available to developers everywhere.

Support for Docker images in Google App Engine
Last month we released improved Docker image support in Compute Engine. Today, we’re building on that work and adding a set of extensions that allow App Engine developers to build and deploy Docker images in Managed VMs. Developers can use these extensions to easily access the large and growing library of Docker images, and the Docker community can easily deploy containers into a completely managed environment with access to services such as Cloud Datastore. If you want to try it, sign up via this form.

Kubernetes—an open source container manager
Based on our experience running Linux containers within Google, we know how important it is to be able to efficiently schedule containers at Internet scale. We use Omega within Google, but many developers have more modest needs. To that end, we’re announcing Kubernetes, a lean yet powerful open-source container manager that deploys containers into a fleet of machines, provides health management and replication capabilities, and makes it easy for containers to connect to one another and the outside world. (For the curious, Kubernetes (koo-ber-nay'-tace) is Greek for “helmsman” of a ship.) Kubernetes was developed from the outset to be an extensible, community-supported project. Take a look at the source and documentation on GitHub and let us know what you think via our mailing list. We’ll continue to build out the feature set, while collaborating with the Docker community to incorporate the best ideas from Kubernetes into Docker.

Container stack improvements
We’ve released an open-source tool called cAdvisor that enables fine-grain statistics on resource usage for containers. It tracks both instantaneous and historical stats for a wide variety of resources, handles nested containers, and supports both LMCTFY and Docker’s libcontainer. It’s written in Go with the hope that we can move some of these tools into libcontainer directly if people find them useful (as we have).

A commitment to open container standards
Finally, I'm happy that I've been nominated to Docker's Governance Committee to continue working with the Docker community toward better open container standards. Containers have been a great building block for Google and by working together we can make them the key building block for “cloud native” applications.

-Posted by Eric Brewer, VP of Infrastructure

Google Summer of Code 2014 New Organizations - Part One

Every year, we spend time highlighting each of the “rookie” organizations who have joined Google Summer of Code (GSoC). With over 40 new organizations to the program in 2014, we’ll dedicate Fridays this summer to spotlight their mission and goals of participating in GSoC. This week, the Organization Administrators from Amahi and Code Mirror tell us more about their organizations.

Amahi is an open source home server solution based on linux distribution, developed with the goal of making networking simple. It provides all the functionality you would want in a home server (e.g. DHCP, DNS, File Sharing), while being as easy to use as a web browser. Designed as a modular architecture, Amahi is easily expandable through one click application installs to provide additional features such as Media Streaming, VPN, Disk Pooling and more.

This is Amahi’s first year as a mentoring organization in Google Summer of Code and we were
fortunate to have three student participants. Kasun Thennakoon will work on a Disk Wizard plugin which is one of the most requested features on the platform side. This will provide an intuitive interface for adding new storage to your home server. Arpit Goyal will work on “what is next”, by upgrading the platform to the latest technology (i.e. Rails 4) and facilitate the application installation by improving the Amahi plugin system. Last but not least, we have Artur Dryomov who will work on the Amahi Anywhere android app, that will give users access to their home server data from any location without VPN or port forwarding.

By Carlos Puchol and Bogdan Mitrea, Amahi Organization Administrators

CodeMirror is a versatile text editor implemented in JavaScript for your browser. It is specialized for editing code and comes with a number of language modes and add-ons that implement more advanced editing functionality. A rich programming API and a CSS theming system are available for customizing CodeMirror to fit your application. We've had a pretty narrow developer base thus far—participating in Google Summer of Code is a great way for us to get some talent on board for the summer, and hopefully longer.

This summer we have two Google Summer of Code students. One who is working on improving bidirectional text support and the other student will work on improving the vim bindings (specifically the visual mode and undo tree).

By Marijn Haverbeke, Code Mirror Organization Administrator

A chip off the ol’ Google Summer of Code block

We here in the Google Open Source Programs Office are always excited to hear about programs that are similar (or even inspired by) our flagship student program, Google Summer of Code (GSoC). Contributing to open source software in any capacity makes us happy, and learning about students exchanged in open source development makes us just plain giddy. We’d like to use today’s post to highlight some of the great open source student programs from past and present.

• Outreach Program For Women - a program that encourages women to get involved in open source software
• Open Summer of Code - an open source program for students in Belgium
• Rails Girls Summer of Code - three-month full time scholarships to pairs of Rails Girls students, supported by coaches
• Ruby Summer of Code - a student internship program designed to help fund student development of Ruby coding projects
• European Space Agency Summer of Code - offers student developers stipends to write code for various space-related open source software projects
• Oman Summer of Code - a open source coding program based in Oman
• Summer of Learning at CMU - students learn how to program robots using free software

And don’t forget that Melange, the software used to run GSoC (as well as our contest for younger students, Google Code-in), is also open sourced. You are welcome to use it to start your own program. The source code can be found here.

Please use the comments section on the blog to tell us about your favorite Google Summer of Code-esqe program. We’d love to hear more!

By Mary Radomile, Open Source Programs