At Citrix, we believe that enabling customers and partners to choose any public cloud platform that they want for running business workloads is critical to success. Since our first public cloud platform offering, we have made great progress in ensuring that platform choice is front and center for designing the secure digital workspace of the future. Many of our customers that are running Google and Citrix solutions like Receiver for Chrome, Android in the Enterprise with XenMobile and G Suite with ShareFile asked what about Google Cloud and we listened. Earlier this year, Citrix and Google announced a broader collaboration to support Google Cloud for Citrix Cloud and our XenApp and XenDesktop Service.

We thought it would be only pertinent to talk about the technical architecture of how Citrix Cloud and XenApp integrate with Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Let’s start with a brief overview of Citrix Cloud with GCP. Citrix Cloud is a cloud-based management and integration platform service that simplifies the management of the Citrix infrastructure required to deliver XenApp and XenDesktop. In a Citrix Cloud model, the key components such as a Delivery controller, StoreFront, SQL, and License server are all managed by Citrix. This architecture simplifies the day to day management and reduces the IaaS requirements in GCP for Citrix.The key components required to connect Citrix Cloud to GCP are simply just the cloud connectors which are a set of VMS which provides high availability (HA) stateless SSL connectivity to Citrix Cloud. Of course, Active Directory is required as well, and with that prerequisite, in place, the Cloud Connectors will enable that as a resource location in Citrix Cloud.