Google wants businesses to be able to manoeuvre easily between public clouds, using the infrastructure they want, when they want it – and without getting locked into a single vendor or having trouble accessing data elsewhere. The firm calls this the “open cloud” approach.
According to Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian, the company has been working open cloud for months now.
First it built BigQuery Omni, which allows Google Cloud users to analyze data stored on other clouds. Then it created Anthos for hybrid cloud application development, followed by Cloud Monitoring which enables clients to track their workload health across different platforms.
All of this, Kurian says, adds up to a more open cloud infrastructure.
“Our open cloud philosophy is grounded in the belief that customers need autonomy and control over their infrastructure,” he wrote in a blog post.
“Giving customers options to build, migrate and deploy their applications across multiple environments both in the cloud and on-premises allows them to avoid vendor lock-in and innovate across environments faster.”
There is also the ability to meet “data survivability requirements” better. Sometimes, for whatever reason, cloud service providers may suspend their services. In such a scenario, the customer needs to be able to move its data to another service sooner, rather than later.
While these products are an important part in the open cloud strategy, there is still need for open sourced technology, including Kubernetes.
“We don’t think it’s possible to fully address survivability requirements with a proprietary solution,” Kurian added.
“Instead, solutions based on open source tools and open standards are the route to addressing customer and policymaker concerns. More importantly, open source gives customers the flexibility to deploy — and, if necessary, migrate — critical workloads across or off public cloud platforms.”
