Google LLC today introduced two new networking tools for its cloud platform that aim to simplify the management of infrastructure-as-a-service environments, as well as make it easier to link them with a company’s on-premises data centers.

The first addition announced at the Google Cloud Next conference in San Francisco is a product called Traffic Director. It provides features to help companies implement a service mesh, a layer of software for handling communications between their cloud applications. The service mesh model is seeing rapid adoption these days because it centralizes network operations that once had to be handled separately, which streamlines tasks such as error diagnosis.

With Traffic Director, Google is looking to take this manageability up another notch. The tool provides the ability to distribute a service mesh across multiple Google Cloud data centers to ensure applications can keep running even if one facility becomes inaccessible. When an outage occurs, Traffic Director automatically reroutes traffic headed to the affected systems to another part of the service mesh.

The tool also lets administrators set up additional safeguards for preventing downtime. They can create “circuit breakers” to prevent failures from cascading, as well as configure applications to automatically resend network requests that failed the first time.

“Organizations are increasingly building applications based on containers and microservices, while continuing to run existing VM [virtual machine]-based and other workloads,” Brad Calder, Google Cloud’s vice president of infrastructure engineering, wrote in a blog post. “We … believe that service mesh technology is particularly well suited to managing these kinds of environments in a consistent fashion.”

The other offering Google debuted today has a more narrow focus on hybrid cloud deployments. High Availability VPN, as it’s called, will enable companies to securely link their on-premises infrastructure to Google Cloud. The service provides the ability to transmit information between environments through encrypted connections that protect against snooping attempts.

It’s the same approach that consumer VPN tools use, except with a a bigger emphasis on preventing outages. High Availability VPN allows companies to create encrypted connections in pairs so that if one experiences an issue, data can still continue flowing as normal through the other.

“We offer two modes for HA VPN: active/active, in which both redundant tunnels carry traffic under normal operations, and active/passive, in which one tunnel actively carries traffic while the other one acts as a backup,” Calder wrote.

Photo: Google