Google Cloud buddies up with open source giants

Google Cloud will start offering a number of leading open source projects as managed services.

Announced at its 2019 Next conference in San Francisco, the vendor signed partnerships with Confluent, DataStax, Elastic, InfluxData, MongoDB, Neo4j and Redis Labs to become cloud-based fully managed services on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

The services will see customers offered management, support and a single bill - from Google - and the company has also dropped a hint about future integration with native GCP services.

“We’ve always seen our friends in the open-source community as equal collaborators, and not simply a resource to be mined,” Google Cloud said.

“We’re working alongside these creators and supporting the growth of these companies’ technologies to inspire strong customer experiences and adoption.”

The services are fully managed and are available through a single user interface, with the ability to provision and manage the service from the Google Cloud Console.

“A majority” of the partners also benefit from Google Cloud support, allowing customers to manage and log support tickets in a single window without having to deal with each provider separately.

Lastly, Google will bill customers with one invoice that includes services from the partners, and will count towards their overall Google Cloud spending commitments.

Looking forward, Google is working with the partners to build integrations with native GCP services like Stackdriver for monitoring and Identity & Access Management (IAM).

Google said the partners are some of the “top-ranked databases in their respective categories”. Here’s what each partner offers:

• Confluent: builds an event streaming platform to give customers access data as real-time streams.
• DataStax: offers an always-on, distributed cloud database built on Apache’s Cassandra service, and is designed for hybrid cloud.
• Elastic: builds self-managed and SaaS offerings that make data usable in real time and at scale for search use cases
• InfluxData: its time series platform can instrument, observe, learn and automate any
  system, application and business process
• MongoDB: general-purpose database platform bringing software and data to developers and the applications they build
• Neo4j: native graph database platform optimised to map, store, and traverse networks of highly connected data
• Redis Labs: main offering is Redis, an in-memory data structure store, used as a database, cache and message broker.

“As we look to an open source-powered cloud future, we’re pleased to bring these partner
technologies to you,” Google Cloud said.

“Partnering with the companies that invest in developing open-source technologies means you get benefits like expertise in operating these services at scale, additional enterprise features, and shorter cycles in bringing the latest innovation to the cloud.”