Google Distributed Cloud is a portfolio of hardware and software solutions that extend Google Cloud infrastructure to the edge and into your data centers.
Workloads such as cellular network infrastructure, facial recognition, and other latency-sensitive, processing-intensive applications exceed the latency and bandwidth capabilities of a traditional cloud service. For such workloads, Distributed Cloud Edge and Edge Appliance offer fully integrated hardware and software solutions that bring the capabilities of Google Cloud directly to your premises. Google provides, deploys, operates, and maintains the dedicated Distributed Cloud Edge hardware and software.
Google Distributed Cloud Edge
Distributed Cloud Edge is an integrated hardware and software solution that runs general-purpose and specialized network function-enabled workloads. A Distributed Cloud Edge rack consists of six server machines and two top-of-rack (ToR) switches that interconnect the machines with your local network. The nodes that execute your workloads run exclusively on this hardware. If you order a GPU-enabled Distributed Cloud Edge configuration, you can also run GPU-based workloads.
The Distributed Cloud Edge hardware runs worker nodes grouped into node pools, which you assign to clusters within your Distributed Cloud Edge Cloud project. You run workloads in containers and virtual machines. Google Cloud remotely runs and manages a Kubernetes control plane that governs these nodes.
Google Distributed Cloud Edge Appliance
Google Distributed Cloud Edge Appliance is a rack-mount server machine providing local storage, machine learning (ML) inference, transformation, and export of data collected on your premises for processing to the Google Cloud Platform. It also can run custom containerized workloads.
Edge Appliance simplifies data collection, analytics, and processing at far edge locations. Your data is stored on the appliance, where containerized applications process the data locally using ML inference, aggregation, and custom logic to generate insights visible to users on the local network. Configurable transfer jobs easily move aggregated insights and relevant data to Cloud Storage when connectivity and bandwidth are available.
Google Distributed Cloud software only
Google Distributed Cloud software extends Google Cloud's infrastructure and services into your data center, with Google-provided software running on your own hardware. Google Distributed Cloud software is based on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), with its own Kubernetes package that extends GKE for use in an on-premises environment. With Distributed Cloud you can create, manage, and upgrade GKE clusters on your own premises while using Google Cloud features, and deploy and operate containerized applications on your clusters at scale using Google's infrastructure.
Google Distributed Cloud software can be installed on either VMware or bare metal:
Google Distributed Cloud for bare metal runs on physical machines, instead of virtual machines, so you can manage application containers on a wide variety of performance-optimized hardware types, like GPUs. Running Google Distributed Cloud on bare metal also allows for direct application access to hardware.
Google Distributed Cloud for VMware runs on your premises in a vSphere environment. vSphere is VMware's virtualization platform.