Google used the Tokyo edition of its Next conference to unwrap further services designed to tempt users onto its Cloud platform.

The firm has launched a beta of a new Migrate for Compute Engine service aimed specifically at Azure customers. The service promises “frictionless migration” with built-in testing together with on-premise rollback if necessary.

There is no cost for the Migrate service, according to the website, though “GCP charges for resources like Compute Engine instances, Cloud Storage, Stackdriver, and networking bandwidth used during your migration.”

Google has had a similar service for AWS users for a while now. But with Azure closing the gap with its fellow Seattle-based giant, it makes sense for Google to roll out the red carpet for the Microsoft platform’s users.

The migrate service is built on the Velostrata service Google hoovered up last year. Google further boosted its migration tooling with the purchase of data ingestion service Alooma earlier this year. 

Google’s Anthos mutli-cloud platform also gets the dedicated migration treatment. Migrate for Anthos “allows you to take VMs from on-prem or Google Computer Engine and move them directly into containers running in Google Kubernetes Engine.” Google said this will give a new lease of life to VMs “which you’d previously written off as not being able to modernise.”

The firm also announced the general availability of its Traffic Director service, which Google describes as a “fully managed traffic control plane” for service meshes. The service will provide “configuration, policy and intelligence to Envoy or similar proxies.”

Tied to the Traffic Director launch is the beta debut of L7 ILB (for Internal Load Balancer), which, Google promises, “allows you to deliver rich traffic control to legacy services with minimal toil” — and with the familiar experience of using a traditional load balancer. L7 ILB is built on the Envoy proxy, and the Traffic Director service.