Tag Archives: networking

Introducing Pivotal Cloud Foundry on Google Cloud Platform

Posted by Jay Marshall, Principal Strategic Advisor

A new way for enterprises to capitalize on Google scale and innovation

Our goal for Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is to build the most open cloud for all businesses, and make it easy for them to build and run great software. This means being good stewards of the open source community, and having strong engineering partnerships with like-minded industry leaders.

Today, we're happy to announce more about our collaboration with Pivotal. Its cloud-native platform, Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF), is based on the open source Cloud Foundry project that it started many years ago. It was a natural fit for the two companies to start working together.

A differentiated Pivotal Cloud Foundry with Google

Customers can now deploy and operate Pivotal Cloud Foundry on GCP. This is a powerful combination that brings Pivotal’s enterprise cloud-native experience together with Google’s infrastructure and innovative technology.

So what does that mean in the real-world? Deployments of PCF on GCP can include:


Further, the combination of PCF and GCP allows customers to access Google’s data and machine learning (ML) services within customer applications via custom-built service brokers that expose GCP services directly into Cloud Foundry.

This level of integration with Google’s infrastructure enables the enterprise to build and deploy apps that can scale, store and analyze data quickly. The following data and machine learning services are now available in Pivotal Cloud Foundry today:

Customer collaboration - PCF and GCP in action

We pride ourself on our “engineer to engineer” approach to working with customers and partners. And that’s exactly how we worked with The Home Depot as a shared customer of GCP and Pivotal Cloud Foundry.

The Home Depot software development team worked side-by-side with Google and Pivotal as they co-engineered the integration of PCF on GCP. Together, they’re building business systems for a digital strategy around this partnership, and will be running parts of homedepot.com on PCF and GCP in time for this year’s Black Friday.

Getting started

We've published a “Pivotal Cloud Foundry on Google Cloud Platform” solutions document that provides an example deployment architecture, as well as links to various setup guides. These links range from the lower-level OSS bits up through step-by-step installation guides with screenshots from our friends at Pivotal. It's a comprehensive guide to help you get started with PCF on GCP.

What’s next

Bringing more GCP services into the Cloud Foundry ecosystem is a priority, and we’re looking at how we can further contribute to the Spring community. Stay tuned for more news and updates- but in the meantime, reach out to your local Pivotal or Google Cloud sales team or contact Sales to talk to someone about this exciting partnership.

Bringing you more flexibility and better Cloud Networking performance, GA of HTTPS Load Balancing and Akamai joins CDN Interconnect

Google’s global network is a key piece of our foundation, enabling all of Google Cloud Platform’s services. Our customers have reiterated to us the critical importance of business continuity and service quality for their key processes, especially around network performance given today’s media-rich web and mobile applications.

We’re making several important announcements today: the general availability of HTTPS Load Balancing, and sustained performance gains from our software-defined network virtualization stack Andromeda, from which customers gain immediate benefits. We’re also introducing Cloud Router and Subnetworks, which together enable fine-grained network management and control demanded by our leading enterprise customers.

In line with our belief that speed is a feature, we’re also extremely pleased to welcome Akamai into our CDN Interconnect program. Origin traffic from Google egressing out to select Akamai CDN locations will take a private route on Google’s edge network, helping to reduce latency and egress costs for our joint customers. Akamai’s peering with Google at a growing number of points-of-presence across Google’s extensive global networking footprint enables us to deliver to our customers the responsiveness they expect from Google’s services.

General Availability of HTTPS Load Balancing. Google’s private fiber network connects our data centers where your applications run to one of more than 70 global network points of presence. HTTPS Load Balancing deployed at these key points across the globe dramatically reduces latency and increases availability for your customers – critically important to achieving the responsiveness users expect from today’s most demanding web and mobile apps. For full details, see the documentation.
Figure 1 Our global load balancing location





Andromeda. Over the past year, we’ve written about our innovations made in Google’s data centers and networking to serve world-class services like Search, YouTube, Maps and Drive. The Cloud Platform team ensures that the benefits from these gains are passed onto customers with no additional effort on their part. Andromeda, Google’s software-defined network virtualization stack, quantifies some of these gains – especially around performance. The chart below shows network throughput gains in Gbits/sec: in a little over a year, throughput has doubled for both single-stream and 200-stream benchmarks.




Subnetworks. Subnetworks allow you to segment IP space into regional prefixes. As a result, you gain fine-grained control over the full logical range in your private IP space, avoiding the need to create multiple networks, and providing full flexibility to create your desired topology.

Additionally, if you’re a VPN customer, you’ll see immediate enhancement as subnetworks allow you to configure your VPN gateway with different destination IP ranges per-region in the same network. In addition to providing more control over VPN routes, regional targeting affords lower latency compared to a single IP range spanning across all regions. Get started with subnetworks here.

Cloud Router. With Cloud Router, your enterprise-grade VPN to Google gets dynamic routing. Network topology changes on either end propagate automatically using BGP, eliminating the need to configure static routes or restart VPN tunnels. You get seamless connectivity with no traffic disruption. Learn more here.

Akamai and CDN Interconnect. Cloud Platform traffic egressing out to select Akamai CDN locations travel over direct peering links and are priced based on Google Cloud Interconnect fares. More information on using Akamai as a CDN Interconnect provider can be found here.

We’ll continue to invest and innovate in our networking capabilities, and pass the benefits of Google’s major networking enhancements to Cloud Platform customers. We always appreciate feedback and would love to learn how we can support your mission-critical workloads. Contact the Cloud Networking team to get started!

– Posted by Morgan Dollard, Cloud Networking Product Management Lead