Google is holding its Cloud Platform Live event today in San Francisco, where it has already made some big announcements.

One of these is Google Container Engine which lets you run Docker containers in compute clusters, powered by the previously announced Kubernetes. Kubernetes, an open source container manager, was announced back in June. More on that here.

“Google Container Engine lets you move from managing application components running on individual virtual machines to launching portable Docker containers that are scheduled into a managed compute cluster for you,” explains Brian Stevens, Google’s VP of Product Management. “Create and wire together container-based services, and gain common capabilities like logging, monitoring and health management with no additional effort. Based on the open source Kubernetes project and running on Google Compute Engine VMs, Container Engine is an optimized and efficient way to build your container-based applications. Because it uses the open source project, it also offers a high level of workload mobility, making it easy to move applications between development machines, on-premise systems, and public cloud providers. Container-based applications can run anywhere, but the combination of fast booting, efficient VM hosts and seamless virtualized network integration make Google Cloud Platform the best place to run them.”

Google also launched the previously announced Managed VMs in App Engine in beta.

Stevens explains, “App Engine was born of our vision to enable customers to focus on their applications rather than the plumbing. Earlier this year, we gave you a sneak peek at the next step in the evolution of App Engine — Managed VMs — which will give you all the benefits of App Engine in a flexible virtual machine environment. Today, Managed VMs goes beta and adds auto-scaling support, Cloud SDK integration and support for runtimes built on Docker containers. App Engine provisions and configures all of the ancillary services that are required to build production applications — network routing, load balancing, auto scaling, monitoring and logging — enabling you to focus on application code. Users can run any language or library and customize or replace the entire runtime stack (want to run Node.js on App Engine? Now you can). Furthermore, you have access to the broader array of machine types that Compute Engine offers.”

Google also announced Google Cloud Interconnect, which gives you three options for connectivity with Google’s infrastructure: Direct (connect to one of 77 point of presences), Carrier, (work with a telecommunication partner), or VPN (to create a secure line directly to Google over the public Internet). 

More on all of this and some other things Google has going on (including price drops on some services) at the event here.

There’s also a lot more information on the Google Cloud Platform Google+ page.

Image via Google