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Google Cloud adds support for Cloud Native Buildpacks

Google Cloud adds support for Cloud Native Buildpacks

Adoption of the open-source technology will speed up the creation of containerized applications.

Last week Google announced that it will be adding support for Cloud Native Buildpacks several of its cloud platform services.

Buildpacks were first conceived by Salesforce’s Heroku subsidiary in 2011. Since then, they have been adopted by Cloud Foundry and other PaaS such as Gitlab, Knative, Deis, Dokku, and Drie.

Why Buildpacks are important

Buildpacks speed up the tedious assembly phase of container projects. To create their application, developers have to manually assemble these components into a single file, which can take a great deal of time in large projects with a lot of moving parts. Buildpacks automate that assembly process.

The technology can scan an application’s source code, identify what is needed and assemble the necessary components. This gives developers a Docker container image that is ready to be deployed immediately.

Why Google wants Buildpacks

Google intends to make Buildpacks the main mechanism for deploying software on Google Cloud’s App Engine application hosting platform. Buildpacks will also become the default mechanism for deploying serverless computing workloads on Cloud Functions.

In a blog post, Google Product Managers Mathew Stoldo and Steren Giannini announced some of the details behind Google’s move to support Buildpacks.

“These buildpacks produce container images that follow best practices and are suitable for running on all of our container platforms,” they wrote. As examples they gave Cloud Run (fully managed), Anthos, and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).

Google Cloud buildpacks use a managed base Ubuntu 18.04 base image that is regularly scanned for security vulnerabilities. This means that any detected vulnerabilities are automatically patched.

“Google Cloud buildpacks can also be customized with additional system packages or to meet your development team’s particular needs, they added. The buildpacks themselves are all written in Go.

Google’s buildpack templates are available on GitHub. Developers can also deploy an app sample using buildpacks if they wish.

Also read: What is Google Anthos? Is this the modern cloud infrastructure you’re looking for?