Google today announced Google Cloud Deploy, a managed, opinionated continuous delivery service that makes continuous delivery to GKE easier, faster, and more reliable.
Deploying container image artefacts into various environments remains a difficult task to many, and there are still no agreed-upon best practices. Google Cloud product manager Victor Szalvay wrote in a blog post:
“Google Cloud Deploy is the product of discussions with more than 50 customers to better understand the challenges they face doing continuous delivery to GKE. From cloud-native to more traditional businesses, three themes consistently emerged: cost of ownership, security and audit, and integration.”
The operational cost of Kubernetes continuous delivery is high and Identifying best and repeatable practices is resource-intensive and takes time away from the core business. That’s why Google Cloud Deploy eliminates the scaling and maintenance responsibilities that typically come with self-managed continuous delivery solutions. It also provides the structure with declaratively defined pipelines and targets.
As for security, Google Cloud Deploy enables fine-grained restriction, with discrete resource access control and execution-level security. Users can also take advantage of flow management features such as release promotion, rollback, and approvals.
Cloud Audit Logs audits user-invoked Google Cloud Deploy activities, providing centralized awareness into who promoted a specific release or made an update to a delivery pipeline. Also, for integration, Google Cloud Deploy embraces the GKE delivery tooling ecosystems in three ways: connectivity to CI systems, support for leading configuration (rendering) tooling, and Pub/Sub notifications to enable third-party integrations.
Szalvay added that comprehensive, easy-to-use, and cost-effective DevOps tools are key to building an efficient software development team, and it’s their hope that Google Cloud Deploy will help them complete their CI/CD pipelines.