Introduction

In one of my previous blogs I discussed Google Kubernetes Engine and how GKE has taken Kubernetes to the next level by providing a fully-managed environment that simplifies deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.

Recently Google made a significant announcement at Google Cloud Next ‘23 about the launch of GKE Enterprise, a new premium edition to GKE. This premium edition seamlessly integrates the best of GKE and Anthos, offering an intuitive and integrated container platform. In this blog, we’ll discuss the transformative features of GKE Enterprise and how it’s shaping the future of containerized applications. Before I delve into the details of GKE Enterprise, let me briefly touch on what Google Cloud Next is. 

Google Cloud Next is an annual conference hosted by Google Cloud Platform (GCP). It is the largest cloud computing conference in the world, and it brings together developers, IT professionals, and businesses to learn about the latest GCP products and technologies. It features a variety of sessions, including keynotes, technical talks, hands-on labs, and networking opportunities. 

Google Cloud Next is a great way to learn about the latest and greatest in cloud computing, and it is a must-attend event for anyone who is interested in cloud computing. Google Cloud Next ‘23 was held in August at San Francisco.

Background

Google has been very well known for its mindset and support for open source toolsets and services. Google’s commitment to open source tools empowers developers worldwide to contribute to and improve them, fostering innovation and progress. This commitment extends to supporting digital sovereignty, ensuring individuals and organisations have control over their data and digital infrastructure. Anthos, Google’s hybrid and multi-cloud platform, exemplifies this commitment by allowing customers to run applications across various environments while maintaining control over their data and applications.

In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, enterprises, government organisations, and policy makers worldwide are seeking hyperscale cloud providers that can cater to their unique needs. They want a cloud solution that not only delivers the functionality, flexibility, and scale of traditional cloud services but also ensures digital sovereignty—a vital requirement in this age of data security and privacy. In response to this demand, Google Cloud introduced its Digital Sovereignty vision in 2020, encompassing three key pillars: data sovereignty, operational sovereignty, and software sovereignty.

More on Data Sovereignty can be read here: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/identity-security/how-google-cloud-is-addressing-data-sovereignty-in-europe-2020 

Evolution of Google Distributed Cloud Hosted 

Google announced a significant addition to its sovereign solutions portfolio earlier this year — Google Distributed Cloud (GDC) Hosted. GDC Hosted is tailored to meet the most stringent requirements of customers, including those dealing with classified, restricted, and top-secret data.

What Does GDC Hosted Offer?

GDC Hosted encompasses the entire spectrum of hardware, software, local control plane, and operational tooling required to deploy, operate, scale, and secure a complete managed cloud. It’s designed to cater to the needs of customers with the highest security demands. Here’s what you can expect from GDC Hosted:

• Full Isolation: GDC Hosted operates in an air-gapped environment, completely disconnected from Google Cloud and the public internet. This isolation remains perpetual, meeting rigorous accreditation requirements, including NIST SP 800-53-FedRAMP High security controls, ICD 503/703, FedRAMP+ for IL6 authorization, and FIPS140-2L3, among others. It aligns with European requirements, ensuring compliance with the EU Open Strategic Autonomy initiative.
• Integrated Cloud Services: While providing high security, GDC Hosted also offers access to advanced Google Cloud services, including state-of-the-art data and machine learning technologies. Users can leverage built-in AI solutions such as Translation API, Speech-to-Text, or optical character recognition (OCR). The Database Service for GDC Hosted taps into Google Cloud’s extensive experience in managing scalable and available data services. Furthermore, GDC Hosted is designed to accommodate third-party solutions through its marketplace for disconnected offerings.
• Open Ecosystem: GDC Hosted aligns with Google Cloud’s open cloud strategy. It’s built on the Kubernetes API and incorporates leading open-source components in its platform and managed services. This commitment to open software ensures ease of adoption, leveraging existing expertise, and avoids the need for customers to learn new proprietary systems.
• Flexible Hardware Options: GDC Hosted provides unmatched flexibility in hardware options, including general-purpose compute and GPUs. Customers can start with as few as four racks and scale up to hundreds as their workloads grow. The platform also offers a fully redundant, high-availability architecture for mission-critical systems.
• Configurable Operations: While the underlying technology remains consistent, GDC Hosted allows customization to meet each customer’s specific requirements and regulations. Customers can enjoy a consistent developer experience while tailoring deployment and operations according to their unique needs. GDC Hosted can be operated by Google, trusted partners, or a combination of both, with customizable elements like operator citizenship and clearance requirements.

GDC Hosted Across Regulated Industries:

GDC Hosted addresses the unique challenges of various regulated industries, including:

• Financial Services: Offers flexibility to meet regional regulatory requirements and protect sensitive financial information. It provides resilience against public cloud interruptions, reduces latency by running closer to legacy systems, and supports data that cannot be placed in a public cloud environment.
• Healthcare: Improves latency for local operation of medical equipment, enables secure clinical trial data management, and ensures the protection of sensitive clinical data.
• Manufacturing: Ensures uninterrupted operations for digital manufacturing, supports AI analysis of proprietary data, and minimizes latency for processing data related to industrial devices.
• Utilities: Secures critical national infrastructure and supports remote environments, such as offshore wind energy farms, with computing resources.

Introduction to Anthos

Anthos is a hybrid and multi-cloud platform that enables customers to build, deploy, and manage applications across any cloud platform or on-premises infrastructure. Anthos provides a consistent set of tools and APIs for managing applications, regardless of where they are running.

Anthos is a good choice for customers who need to run their applications on a hybrid or multi-cloud environment. It is also a good choice for customers who need to maintain control over their data and applications.

Google Cloud Next 23 Announcement:

This year, Google has extended the reach of Anthos with the introduction of Google Distributed Cloud. In line with their ongoing mission, there are three significant announcements for enhancements to Google’s container management products at this year’s Next event:

• Introducing GKE Enterprise: Google unveiled GKE Enterprise, a brand-new premium edition of GKE. This addition will empower companies to accelerate their pace across multiple teams, ensuring seamless and secure management of their most critical business workloads. Furthermore, it helps reduce the total cost of ownership by offering a fully integrated and managed solution courtesy of Google Cloud.
• AI Advancements with GKE: GKE now boasts support for the AI-optimised Cloud TPU v5e, ideal for organisations pioneering the next generation of AI applications. Additionally, we’re pleased to announce the general availability of support for both the A3 VM with NVIDIA H100 GPU and Cloud Storage FUSE for GKE users.
• Boosting Productivity with Duet AI: For platform teams seeking to harness the power of generative AI for enhanced productivity, Duet AI is now available in GKE and Cloud Run. Duet AI is specifically trained on our extensive documentation, making it an invaluable tool to significantly reduce the time required to run containerized applications.

GKE Enterprise: the next evolution of Kubernetes

GKE Enterprise is a new premium edition of GKE that builds on Google Cloud’s leadership in containers and Kubernetes, bringing together the best of GKE and Anthos into an integrated and intuitive container platform, with a unified console experience. GKE Enterprise edition includes a number of new features, including:

• Fleets: A new multi-cluster feature that lets platform engineers easily group similar workloads into dedicated clusters, apply custom configurations and policy guardrails per fleet, isolate sensitive workloads, and even delegate cluster management to other teams.
• AI-native support: GKE now supports the AI-optimised Cloud TPU v5e, making it easier for organisations to develop and deploy AI applications.
• Generative AI assistance: Duet AI in GKE and Cloud Run provides gen AI assistance specifically trained on Google’s documentation to cut down on the time it takes to run containerized applications.

GKE Enterprise is a powerful new container platform that offers a number of advantages including:

• A more unified and intuitive console experience
• Easier multi-cluster management
• AI-native support
• Generative AI assistance

Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) is Google’s managed Kubernetes service that can be used to deploy and operate containerized applications using Google’s infrastructure. It provides the operational power of Kubernetes while managing many of the underlying components, such as the control plane and nodes, for you.

Now GKE features are available in two tiers, or editions: a standard tier of core functionality available to all GKE users, and an enterprise tier that brings all the capabilities of Anthos to GKE, with an integrated user interface and powerful features for governing, managing, and operating containerized workloads at enterprise scale.

GKE Enterprise is available as a limited early access release for clusters on Google Cloud only. Existing Anthos users can continue to use all the same features without any interruption; the new interface will be gradually rolled out to all existing users.

TPU support in GKE: a catalyst for AI success

Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) now supports the AI-optimised Cloud TPU v5e. This makes it easier for organisations to develop and deploy AI applications on Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

TPUs are specialised processors that are designed for machine learning workloads. They can provide significant performance and cost benefits for training and running AI models.

GKE’s support for TPUs makes it easy to integrate TPUs into Kubernetes workloads. This allows organisations to take advantage of the performance and cost benefits of TPUs without having to manage the underlying infrastructure.

GKE’s support for TPUs is a catalyst for AI success because it makes it easier for organisations to develop and deploy AI applications. TPUs can provide significant performance and cost benefits for training and running AI models.

Duet AI in GKE and Cloud Run

Duet AI is a new service that provides AI assistance for running containerized applications. Duet AI is trained on Google’s documentation and can help you with tasks such as:

• Troubleshooting errors
• Optimising performance
• Debugging applications

Duet AI is a valuable tool for developers and operators who run containerized applications. It can help the devs to save time and improve the performance and reliability of their applications.

Conclusion

In conclusion, GKE Enterprise represents a significant advancement in the realm of container and Kubernetes management, capitalising on Google Cloud’s established leadership in this domain. It seamlessly merges the strengths of GKE and Anthos to create a unified, user-friendly container platform with an integrated console experience.

With the introduction of GKE Enterprise, we introduce a groundbreaking multi-cluster feature known as “fleets.” This empowers platform engineers to effortlessly group similar workloads into dedicated clusters, apply custom configurations and policy safeguards per fleet, isolate sensitive workloads, and even delegate cluster management to various teams.

Furthermore, GKE Enterprise comes fortified with a suite of managed security features, encompassing advanced insights into workload vulnerabilities, governance and policy controls, and a managed service mesh— all rooted in the robust Kubernetes open-source ecosystem. Its fully integrated and managed nature, coupled with an intuitive observability dashboard, significantly reduces the time and effort spent on platform management, allowing organisations to focus more on crafting exceptional applications and enriching customer experiences.

Notably, GKE Enterprise extends its support to hybrid and multi-cloud environments, enabling container workloads to operate seamlessly across GKE, other public clouds, or on-premises through Google Distributed Cloud.

In essence, GKE Enterprise streamlines the process of running even the most critical workloads at scale for distributed teams, all while keeping costs and resource requirements in check. These recent enhancements, coupled with ongoing innovations, provide a smoother path for scaling new workloads using containers, whether through Cloud Run, GKE, or a combination of both. It’s a testament to Google Cloud’s commitment to delivering cutting-edge solutions tailored to the evolving needs of businesses in the digital age.

Resources

Google Cloud Next ’23 Announcements

GKE Enterprise Announcement

Google Distributed Cloud Hosted

Google’s 3 Pillars of Data Sovereignty

GKE Enterprise Technical Overview

Disclaimer

This blog post is my opinion and research on a high-level overview of GKE Enterprise and its background. Readers are encouraged to explore the official GCP documentation and additional resources for more in-depth information. Feel free to leave comments with your opinion regarding GKE Enterprise.

I am always happy to help and provide any guidance if you need. Feel free to connect with or follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Goo(gle)d Luck!!!