Google Cloud Platform (GCP) has just announced support for Cloud Native Buildpacks, an open-source technology aimed at speeding up and simplifying the creation of container applications without a Dockerfile. The move is aimed at helping developers by taking away the “complicated and time-consuming” aspect of creating secure container images.
GCP’s latest announcement of Cloud Native Buildpacks comes with a collection of open-source buildpacks and builders. These buildpacks aim to automate the process of assembling containers as it involves a lot of manual processes such as creating security models or OS images. Instead, these buildpacks take away all the manual aspect involved as they scan the source code of an application, figure out the components needed by an application, and automatically assemble the components for the application. In the end, developers get a finished Docker container image ready for their usage.
The buildpacks released by GCP are based on CNCF buildpacks v3 specifications, and Google claims these follow best practices and have been thoroughly tested. The blog post making the announcement states, “these buildpacks are production hardened and tested; they have been used at scale powering most builds for App Engine and Cloud Functions since March.” The buildpacks are now also the default mechanism for software deployment on GCP’s App Engine runtimes and serverless workloads on Cloud Functions. GCP’s Cloud Build now also natively supports buildpacks via the gcloud CLI tool.
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GCP’s Skaffold also comes with live development support for buildpacks, allowing developers to preview changes in local instances of their app. Google Cloud Buildpacks come with Ubuntu 18.04 maintained by Google. Google is also focusing on container security with buildpacks and says, “any detected vulnerabilities are automatically patched. This ensures that when you build your source code with buildpacks, it will be as secure as possible.”
The buildpacks also offer developers the chance to create modules of buildpacks instead of creating a single buildpack for different languages. Google also stated that the buildpacks can be customized based on the needs of enterprises. Lastly, those interested in using the Google Cloud Buildpacks can refer to the blog post mentioning the same here.
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