Container Engine

Deploy, manage, and scale containerized applications, powered by Kubernetes

Try It Free View My Console

Containerized Application Management at Scale

Google Container Engine is a managed environment for deploying containerized applications. It brings our latest innovations in developer productivity, resource efficiency, automated operations, and open source flexibility to accelerate your time to market.

Google has been running production workloads in containers for over 15 years, and we build the best of what we learn into Kubernetes, the industry-leading open source container orchestrator which powers Container Engine.

Ship Early, Ship Often

Container Engine enables rapid application development and iteration by making it easy to deploy, update and manage your applications and services. Container Engine isn’t just for stateless applications either; you can attach persistent storage, and even run a database in your cluster. Simply describe the compute, memory and storage resources your application containers require, and Container Engine will provision and manage the underlying cloud resources automatically.

Reliable and Self-Healing

Google Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) constantly monitor your cluster and its compute, networking, and storage resources so you don't have to. Liveness checks detect and replace hung or crashed applications inside your deployments. Using included container replication strategies, monitoring, and automated repairs, you can achieve highly available services and offer a seamless experience to your users.

Resource-Optimized Deployments

Container Engine handles the scheduling, so you can focus on your application. Your containerized workloads are deployed using sophisticated scheduling that gets the most out of your VMs for better resource optimization. Mix a variety of workloads, such as frontend, backend, and batch workloads, on a shared pool of resources. You can define subsets of VMs with specific characteristics, such as preemptible VMs, to save money on lower-priority jobs.

Scale Effortlessly to Meet Demand

Go from a single machine to thousands: Container Engine autoscaling allows you to handle the increased user demand of your services, keeping them available when it matters most. Then, scale back in the quiet periods to save money, or schedule low-priority batch jobs to use up spare cycles. Container Engine helps you get the most out of your resource pool.

Your Deployments, Your Way

We run upstream Kubernetes, a popular open source container orchestrator originally developed by Google, now managed by a diverse community of contributors. Kubernetes puts you in the driver's seat: you can customize system components including monitoring, logging, and CI/CD by taking advantage of any number of open source and commercial solutions designed for Kubernetes. There’s no vendor lock-in, you’re free to take your workloads out of Container Engine and run them anywhere Kubernetes is supported, including on your own on-premise servers.

Container Engine Features

Run Docker containers on Google Cloud Platform, powered by Kubernetes.

Identity & Access Management: Control access in the cluster with your Google accounts and role permissions.
Hybrid Networking: Reserve an IP address range for your container cluster, allowing your cluster IPs to coexist with private network IPs via Google Cloud VPN.
Security and Compliance: Container Engine is backed by the Google security team of over 750 experts and is both HIPAA and PCI DSS 3.1 compliant.
Integrated Logging & Monitoring: Enable Stackdriver Logging and Stackdriver Monitoring with simple checkbox configurations, making it easy to gain insight into how your application is running.
Auto Scale: Automatically scale your application deployment up and down based on resource utilization (CPU, memory).
Auto Upgrade: Automatically keep your cluster up to date with the latest release version of Kubernetes. Kubernetes release updates are quickly made available within Container Engine.
Auto Repair: When auto repair is enabled, if a node fails a health check Container Engine initiates a repair process for that node.
Resource Limits: Kubernetes allows you to specify how much CPU and memory (RAM) each Container needs, which is used to better organize workloads within your cluster.

Stateful Application Support: Container Engine isn’t just for 12-factor apps. You can attach persistent storage to containers, and even host complete databases.
Docker Image Support: Container Engine supports the common Docker container format.
Fully Managed: Container Engine is fully managed by Google SREs, ensuring your cluster is, available and up-to-date.
OS Built for Containers: Container Engine runs on Container-Optimized OS, a hardened OS built and managed by Google.
Private Container Registry: Integrating with Google Container Registry makes it easy to store and access your private Docker images.
Fast Consistent Builds: Use Google Container Builder to reliably deploy your containers on Container Engines without needing to setup authentication.
Open Source Portability: Container Engine runs upstream Kubernetes, enabling workload portability to other Kubernetes platforms across clouds and on-prem.

“Container Engine delivers a high-performing, flexible infrastructure that lets us independently scale components for maximum efficiency.”
- George Yianni Inventor of Hue and head of technology-connected lighting for the home at Philips Lighting

“Niantic chose Container Engine for its ability to orchestrate their container cluster at planetary-scale, freeing its team to focus on deploying live changes for their players.”
- Container Engine powers Pokémon GO

Try It Free

Container Engine Pricing