Cloud Marketplace

The Google Cloud Marketplace is a curated catalogue of enterprise-ready solutions that you can deploy directly onto your Google Cloud infrastructure. It includes virtual machine images, containerised applications, Kubernetes apps, SaaS offerings, and managed data services — all from Google and third-party vendors. The Marketplace simplifies procurement, deployment, and billing for a wide range of software.

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What is Cloud Marketplace?

Cloud Marketplace (formerly Cloud Launcher) is an online store within the Google Cloud Console where you can discover, evaluate, and deploy third-party and open-source software. It serves as a one-stop shop for solutions that integrate with GCP.

Key characteristics:

• Integrated billing — charges for Marketplace solutions appear on your existing GCP invoice. No separate procurement or payment process is needed.
• Pre-configured deployments — solutions come as ready-to-deploy packages with documented configurations
• Verified by Google — all solutions undergo a verification process to ensure quality and security
• Variety of deployment types — VM images, Kubernetes applications, SaaS integrations, and managed services
• Free and paid options — many open-source solutions are free (you only pay for the underlying GCP infrastructure); commercial solutions include software licence fees

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Types of Solutions

Cloud Marketplace offers several types of solutions:

Type	Description	Examples
VM Solutions	Pre-configured virtual machine images that you deploy on Compute Engine	WordPress, LAMP stack, Jenkins
Kubernetes Apps	Containerised applications deployed to GKE clusters	Elasticsearch, Kafka, Redis
SaaS	Software-as-a-Service solutions that integrate with GCP	Datadog, Splunk, MongoDB Atlas
Managed Services	Fully managed third-party data services	Confluent Cloud (Kafka), Elastic Cloud, Neo4j Aura
Datasets	Public and commercial datasets available in BigQuery	US Census data, weather data, financial data

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Deploying a VM Solution

Deploying a VM-based solution from the Marketplace is straightforward:

1. Navigate to Cloud Marketplace in the Cloud Console
2. Search for the solution (e.g., "WordPress")
3. Click on the solution to view details, pricing, and documentation
4. Click Launch
5. Configure the deployment:
   • Deployment name — a unique identifier for this deployment
   • Zone — where the VM will be created
   • Machine type — the size of the VM (vCPUs and memory)
   • Boot disk — disk type and size
   • Networking — firewall rules and network settings
6. Click Deploy

The Marketplace uses Deployment Manager (GCP's infrastructure-as-code tool) to create all the required resources — VMs, disks, firewall rules, and more.

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Deploying a Kubernetes Application

For Kubernetes applications:

1. Ensure you have a GKE cluster running
2. Navigate to Cloud Marketplace and find the application
3. Click Configure
4. Select the target GKE cluster and namespace
5. Configure application-specific settings (e.g., replica count, storage size)
6. Click Deploy

The application is deployed as a set of Kubernetes resources (Deployments, Services, ConfigMaps, etc.) in your cluster.

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SaaS and Managed Services

SaaS solutions and managed services in the Marketplace work differently: