Today’s post is the latest installation in our 2014 Google Cloud Platform Year in Review. Every day until January, we will be featuring a different Googler sharing their highlight from the past year in Cloud Platform.



I believe the cloud should be about the provider doing the hard things so that the user gets a simpler, easier to use model - whether that has to do with technical decisions or business ones. We made many strides in that direction this year, but the two that stand out most for me are:




  • We took the first steps towards ending the PaaS/IaaS dichotomy by giving developers the ease of use and productivity of App Engine and the flexibility of VMs with beta launch of App Engine Managed VMs. Customers shouldn’t have to make a binding decision about what level of the stack they want to build their applications at. The launch of Managed VMs and Google Container Engine make it possible to run the same code as a fully managed application, as a unit of code in a managed logical cluster, and in a self-managed Virtual Machine

  • The launch of sustained use discounts makes it very easy for our customers to automatically benefit from up to 30% lower prices for their sustained workloads without any long-term commitments.




- Posted by Navneet Joneja, Product Manager