Google’s Cloud Launcher is now the GCP Marketplace, adds container-based applications [TechCrunch]

Cloud Launcher has long been Google’s marketplace for cloud-based application from third-party vendors that lets you deploy them in Google’s cloud with just a few clicks. That name never quite highlighted that Cloud Launcher also included commercial applications and that Google cloud handle the billing for those and combine it with a user’s regular GCP bill, so the company has now decided to rebrand the services as the GCP Marketplace.

That’s not all, though. With today’s update, Google is also adding both commercial and open source container-based applications to the service that users can easily deploy to the Google Kubernetes Engine (or any other Kubernetes service). Until today, the marketplace only featured traditional virtual machines, but a lot of customers were surely looking for container support, too.

As Google rightly argues, Kubernetes Engine can take a lot of the hassle out of managing containers, but deploying them to a Kubernetes cluster is still often a manual process. Google promises that it’ll only take a click to deploy an application from the marketplace to the Kubernetes engine or any other Kubernetes deployment.

As Google Cloud product manager Brian Singer told me, his team worked closely with the Kubernetes Engine team to make this integration as seamless as possible. The solutions that are in the marketplace today include developer tools like GitLab, graph database Neo4j, the Kasten data management service, as well as open source projects like WordPress, Spark, Elasticsearch, Nginx and Cassandra.