Google simplifies connections between its cloud services and Kubernetes clusters

Google Cloud announced a new pair of tools in beta today designed to simplify the process of integrating its cloud services with applications that are managed by a Kubernetes cluster. The Kubernetes Service Catalog and Google Cloud Platform Service Broker API provide programmatic access to other cloud services like Pub/Sub, Cloud SQL, and Cloud Spanner.

Those connections are critical for developers who want to do things like store application databases in other Google services, while keeping those applications running inside Kubernetes. They both work in clusters managed by Google Cloud Platform, but also in other environments like on-premises datacenters.

It’s also a win for the cloud provider because these offerings make it easier for developers to tie their applications into other services that will cause them to consume more Google Cloud services. Microsoft already offers an Open Service Broker for Azure that provides similar functionality for connecting Kubernetes workloads to its cloud services.

As its name implies, the Kubernetes Service Catalog provides a list of all the Google Cloud services customers can connect their clusters to, and the GCP Open Service Broker helps manage the connections between a cluster and those services.

All of this is part of a broader shift by cloud providers to embrace Kubernetes and the applications that it enables.