Google Joins OpenStack In Massive Cloud War Offensive

Google has joined the OpenStack Foundation, making a bold statement about its future intentions to take on cloud rivals Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.

The search giant, which runs its public cloud business with Google Cloud, is in competition with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. All three of these business are now turning their attention to the hybrid cloud space, which is traditionally the home of the large enterprise customer.

OpenStack is the open source cloud computing platform with high profile backers including IBM and HP. In theory, OpenStack allows anyone to create their own cloud platform, but in reality the ecosystem has been dominated by large players wanting to push their own OpenStack model.

Google Openstack

By pledging its allegiance to the OpenStack project, Google has thrown down the gauntlet in the fight for slurping up businesses to use its cloud service, enticing customers to use Google Cloud even if they operate their own private or hybrid cloud platforms.

“Google is sponsoring the OpenStack Foundation, underscoring its commitment to open source and open cloud technologies,” said Mark Collier COO, OpenStack Foundation.

On the Google Cloud blog, the firm said: “As we look to the future of computing in the enterprise, we see two important trends emerging. The first is a move towards the hybrid cloud.  Few enterprises can move their entire infrastructure to the public cloud. For most, hybrid deployments will be the norm and OpenStack is emerging as a standard for the on-premises component of these deployments.”

Hybrid future

Now, customers who might never have given Google Cloud a thought may be swayed at the prospect of using proven cloud services with the benefit of having them private or hybrid, mostly under their own control.

As part of the support, Google will bring in its container expertise to the OpenStack project.

“The second trend is a move towards container-oriented computing,” said Google. “Google pioneered new patterns around containers, dynamic scheduling, and micro-service architectures.  We did this to solve hard problems building and operating applications at internet scale, but the model translates well to everyday applications and solves long standing problems in operations.”

Google thinks that both hybrid cloud and containers are going to be important to businesses globally, and by hooking up with the OpenStack Foundation, it can show off its container technologies to the array of enterprise developers looking to improve the relationship between public and private clouds.

“I just spoke with a large enterprise user of OpenStack this week who described OpenStack as their “path to production” for containers. The value proposition for them is that OpenStack can provide a single control plane across all of their infrastructure, which will include VMware, KVM and containerized workloads,” added Collier.

“OpenStack gives them a solid platform to explore new and compelling technologies as they emerge, and I know they’ll be even more confident in that path knowing that Google has joined our mission to make OpenStack the platform for containerized workloads. Having a company with Google’s cloud-native chops backing OpenStack is huge, and we can’t wait to see what the future of open collaboration brings to cloud computing!”

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