Google Brings Its Cloud On-Premises

Google is becoming the latest major public cloud provider to enable enterprises to more easily adopt hybrid clouds by bringing cloud computing capabilities into their on-premises data centers.

Google officials this week said the company’s Cloud Services Platform (CSP), which was announced last year, is now in beta, which means organizations can run Google cloud applications and services within their own firewalls and manage them in a unified fashion with workloads running in public clouds. The move is a nod to the trend of organizations adopting both hybrid and multicloud strategies. Enterprises are not ready to put all of their workloads into the cloud, opting instead to keep many on-premises.

They’re also not putting all of their cloud workloads onto a single vendor’s cloud, with many opting to work with multiple providers.

It’s a trend that other cloud providers have addressed in recent years. In 2017, Microsoft launched Azure Stack as a way of enabling enterprises to run Azure workloads and services on certified OEM solutions in their data centers. In November 2018, Amazon Web Services announced AWS Outposts, offering racks of its own AWS-designed servers and storage appliances that can be run on-premises and connect back to Amazon cloud services. Others also are offering on-premises cloud capabilities, including IBM with its IBM Cloud Private.

Ensono’s Jason Woodrum

“The latest announcement from Google, Cloud Services Platform, validates the demand for hybrid cloud services,” Jason Woodrum, director of public cloud solution architecture at Ensono, told Channel Futures. “Google is catching the wave at the right time. Soon, customers will be able to consume cloud services, on-premise, from the big three, and extend the flexibility of cloud, containers, stretch clusters, and more within their data center.”

Ensono is an MSP partner with AWS and Azure, and Woodrum said the company has been supporting Azure stack for a few years and is supporting AWS Outposts as part of the Ensono Private Cloud portfolio.

“It’s important for clients to remember that cloud is a journey, not a destination, and hybrid cloud services are continuously evolving,” he said.

Cavirin’s Nisha Agarwal

According to IDC analysts, 65 percent of organizations have a hybrid cloud strategy, and Google’s CSP as well as similar moves by AWS, Azure and others are a way of expanding the providers’ presence in hybrid cloud deployments. Cavirin, which provides cybersecurity products for enterprise hybrid clouds, is a technology partner of Google Cloud, AWS and Azure.

Google’s CSP “is an expected move given the importance of hybrid cloud deployments,” Nisha Agarwal, vice president of strategic partnerships at Cavirin, told Channel Futures. “Enterprises now have a more consistent view of their cyber posture spanning on-prem and Google Cloud, and Google consulting partners will have a new revenue opportunity with hybrid deployments.”

Gartner analysts agree, saying that by 2021, the cloud computing and service market will hit $300 billion. While the IT services space is growing 2 to 3 percent a year, the cloud market is expanding at about 18 percent annually, creating a significant growth opportunity for IT services providers. Gartner is predicting that the number of cloud managed service provides will triple by 2020.

According to Google officials, CSP will give enterprise an alternative to other offerings by …

… not forcing them to buy additional hardware.

“If you’ve ever thought about adopting a hybrid cloud, you know it usually means committing to a cloud vendor and purchasing new hardware — with no easy way of integrating your existing on-premises investments,” Eyal Manor, vice president of Google Cloud, wrote in a blog post. “At Google Cloud, we are taking a different approach, with a software-based, hybrid offering that brings Google Cloud services into your on-prem infrastructure using the power of Kubernetes and Istio to meet you where you are.”

Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration technology, while Istio is an open-source service mesh designed to help organizations use microservices. The CSP platform is built atop of the Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). The platform includes GKE On-Prem, a service that delivers lifecycle manage for on-premises clusters and runs on the customer’s existing infrastructure.

“You can write once and deploy to the cloud or on-prem, using a consistent platform that spans all your environments,” Manor wrote. “Furthermore, CSP’s design allows you to integrate existing networking, storage, and identity capabilities that you already use, so you can move to the cloud when you are ready.”

CSP Config Management enables enterprises to create multi-cluster policies and deploy configurations across clusters both on-premises and in the cloud. Istio provides policy enforcement.