Google has announced VM Manager, a suite of infrastructure management tools it said will simplify and automate the maintenance of large fleets of Compute Engine VMs.
Google is pushing the new offering in a bid to help relieve the complexity involved in moving workloads to the cloud.
“Enterprises are accelerating their digital transformation — moving more and more workloads to the cloud. The cloud can often be complex, however, with unfamiliar tools to manage and operate large fleets of virtual machines (VM),” a blog post penned by product managers Ravi Kiran Chintalapudi and Senanu Aggor says.
“In particular, managing infrastructure security and compliance visibility at cloud scale can be challenging for infrastructure and operations administrators.”
The new offering is touted as being simplified cloud-native tools that can operate and manage cloud resources, similar to on-premises infrastructure management tools, through automation.
VM Manager comprises a single dashboard to allow real-time tracking of inventory and the suite supports the most common Windows and Linux environments.
Services includes are patch management, configuration management, and inventory management.
See also: What Google Cloud Platform is and why you’d use it
The patch management service boasts two main components, patch compliance reporting, which provides insights on the patch status of VMs across Windows and Linux distributions; and patch deployment, which automates the OS and software patch update process.
“This service keeps your systems up-to-date against vulnerabilities by allowing you to apply OS patches across a set of VMs, receive patch compliance data across your OS environments, and automate installation of OS patches across VMs — all from one centralised location,” the blog reads.
Configuration management allows users to deploy, query, and maintain consistent configurations for VMs. It also boasts automated remediation features.
While inventory management lets users collect OS and package information, allowing identification of which VMs are running a specific version of an OS system, view packages that are installed on a VM, generate a list of package updates available for each VM, and identify missing packages, updates, or patches for a VM, the blog explains.
Inventory management is integrated with Google Cloud Asset Inventory.
