cloud-test: Google Cloud Launcher welcomes Zend, NGINX, and Expert System as featured technology partners

Google Cloud Platform Blog

Google Cloud Launcher welcomes Zend, NGINX, and Expert System as featured technology partners

Friday, October 2, 2015

Editor's Update February 22, 2016: The Windows Active Directory service is no longer available in Cloud Launcher, and reference to the service has been removed from this post.

Google Cloud Launcher was created to provide customers an easy way to discover and deploy a variety of third-party solutions onto Google Cloud Platform. Today, we’re happy to announce new collaborations with Zend, NGINX, and Expert System as our first partners to contribute commercial solutions to our growing inventory.

You can now deploy commercially supported solutions with technical support included such as Zend Server, NGINX Plus, and Cogito API Core onto your choice of VM in just a few clicks. And to keep things simple, you will receive a unified bill from us for these services along with your other Google Cloud Platform usage costs at the end of the month.

	Zend Server is an application server with a supported PHP runtime that can scale apps seamlessly across cloud resources, from the company most associated with PHP. Zend Server gives PHP developers and DevOps engineers amazing dev tools like Z-Ray, app deployment automation, performance monitoring, request analysis, and configuration management so apps run faster, scale better, and stay up longer. "Zend Server on Google Cloud Platform will allow PHP developers to produce enterprise-grade applications in the very epicenter of disruption -- the cloud.," said Andi Gutmans, CEO and co-founder, Zend. "Our work with Google Cloud Platform gives developers the ammunition they need to create the quality, forward-looking applications businesses require to thrive."
	NGINX Plus is a high performance, flexible, scalable, secure web accelerator and a web server. NGINX features include: Layer 4 / Layer 7 load balancing; application request routing; support for FastCGI, uwsgi, SCGI and memcached protocols; HTTP streaming media; SSL termination; bandwidth and request control; reverse proxy for HTTP, SMTP, IMAP and POP3; content caching; static content offload. "We're excited to make NGINX Plus available on Google Cloud Platform as a fully supported solution," said Paul Oh, head of business development at NGINX, Inc. "Together, we're making it easier than ever before for organizations to deliver applications from the cloud with the speed and performance their customers have come to expect."
	Through an understanding of the meaning of words in context, Cogito API Core identifies the entities present in documents, relations between the entities, concepts, and the semantically relevant information contained in a text. “We are excited to offer a text analytics, semantic API through Google Cloud Platform, the most scalable and reliable infrastructure in the world”, said Marcello Pellacani, VP Strategic Partnerships, Expert System. “We’re looking forward to expanding the features and services available via Cloud Launcher, as APIs are a key element in developing and delivering world-class products.”

Moreover, Cloud Launcher can now be easily accessed directly in the Google Developers Console, creating a more unified experience that doesn’t require you to leave the management console to find and deploy a solution. This marks a next step toward our goal of surfacing the right solution at the right time for customers and making 3rd party solutions feel as native as possible.

Cloud Launcher is a prominent menu item in Developers Console

Since our last update, we’ve also added ASP.NET framework, and several popular open-source solutions that our users have requested, including Open edX and Redmine.

Expect more partners and solutions to be added as we expand our inventory of useful open-source and commercial options, and continue to give us suggestions about products and services you love using or would like to see us include in Cloud Launcher!

- Posted by Leslie Lee, Product Manager