Google has moved its Cloud Services Platform into beta, seven months after first unveiling the Kubernetes fuelled project.

The announcement brings some additions to the platform first floated last year, along with an apparent amping up of the “hybrid” element of the platform.

Eyal Manor, vp for Google Cloud, said in a blog post that adopting hybrid cloud “usually means committing to a cloud vendor and purchasing new hardware—with no easy way of integrating your existing on-premises investments.”

Google Cloud, he claimed, was “taking a different approach, with a software-based, hybrid offering that brings Google Cloud services into your on-prem infrastructure using the power of Kubernetes and Istio to meet you where you are.”

So, the freshly beta’d implementation includes the GKE On-Prem managed Kubernetes service, “providing remote lifecycle management of your on-prem clusters, keeping them updated and secure”. Admins will be able to “write once and deploy to the cloud or on-prem, using a consistent platform that spans all your environments” and integrate “existing networking, storage, and identity capabilities that you already use, so you can move to the cloud when you are ready.”

Policy is taken care of by the newly introduced – or at least newly named – CSP Config Management, which Manor said allows “the configuration of multi-cluster policies out of the box”. Config Management is pitched as working “great” with Istio, the service mesh which hit 1.0 in sync with last year’s announcement, and has just hit v1.0.6.

Other key elements include Stackdriver Monitoring, Google’s monitoring tool – which spans both GCP and AWS – and Knative, the serverless tool Google launched last year.

One notable aspect of Manor’s post was the emphasis on hybrid cloud. He claimed that CSP was built on open APIs and therefore “a less disruptive and more compliant approach than competing hybrid offerings.” It would give customers the chance to “modernise your applications at your own pace…”

In last year’s original announcement of CSP, references to hybrid cloud were more oblique, with Google promising to bring the benefits of the cloud to customers, “no matter where you deploy your IT infrastructure today – or tomorrow” and saying the CSP was “technologically and architecturally aligned with the joint hybrid clouds products we’ve been developing…with our partner Cisco.”

Today’s announcement seemed to assume the CSP tools would be deployed on-prem, even before customers went hell for leather for the cloud.

Of course, the ultimate destination will still be Google’s Cloud Platform, and the vendor is taking full advantage of its Kubernetes-shaped halo to impress potential customers. Earlier this week it hoovered up Israeli data migration company Alooma to ease the transition to the cloud for companies with large amounts of data.