Google rolls out more public cloud tools for devs, including a debugger

SAN FRANCISCO — Google made its fledgling Google Cloud Platform for making and running apps more developer-friendly today, by launching a series of tools that speed up discovery of problems and improve monitoring.

At the developer-centric Google I/O conference today, Greg DeMichillie, director of product management on the Google Cloud Platform, demonstrated Cloud Save, Cloud Debugger, and Cloud Trace.

Cloud Save, DeMichillie said, “is a new simple API (application programming interface) that lets me save and retrieve per-user information.” That could include settings or preferences for each user.

Cloud Debugger shows all the calls an application in Google’s cloud is making to external services. That drill-down is the first step; from there, a developer can log in to the actual code, change it as necessary, while the application stays in production.

Cloud Trace shows charts that can help developers determine if their changes have made a difference in how long it takes for applications to run.

Google has been going crazy with feature announcements for the Google Cloud Platform, and today’s news aligns with that theme. Now Google must persuade more startups, enterprises, intelligence agencies — anyone with money for computing outside of on-premises data centers, really — to use the platform.