OpenStack and Google – a match made in heaven
OpenStack is a cloud operating system that controls large pools of compute, storage, and networking resources throughout a datacenter, all managed through a dashboard that gives administrators control while empowering their users to provision resources through a web interface.
We all know the OpenStack Foundation has no shortage of big name vendors that support its mission, and the latest one is surely the best proof. Last month, Google Inc. has become a corporate sponsor of the free cloud operating system, and in particular, containers, the virtualization format that has taken the industry by storm in recent months.
Google is one of the first companies to have adopted the technology on a large scale and its open-source Kubernetes project is the existing standard for orchestrating such clusters. But let’s have a quick look at the main benefits of this collaboration for both parties:
- Better support for containers and Kubernetes for OpenStack
As I already mentioned, the main reason Google and OpenStack were drawn closer together was Kubernetes, developed by Google to manage software containers (specifically, Docker) at scale. OpenStack’s container management service Magnum, officially added to the project as of last March, uses Kubernetes as its orchestration component, so it makes sense to have the experts behind it contributing as directly as possible.
- More feedback about Kubernetes at scale for Google
Getting more feedback from OpenStack customers and being able to make specific recommendations to the project about how best to implement Kubernetes will surely to be useful.
- OpenStack to reinvent itself as a container management system
Even if recently OpenStack has finally picked up business opportunities outside the telecom space, its market remains limited. Despite OpenStack’s disconnect from Azure and AWS, container technology simply provides more tangible benefit to enterprises than OpenStack does.
- An attraction into its cloud services for Google
Google might be working more closely with OpenStack in order to make Google Cloud Platform a seamless public complement to OpenStack, and to expand Cloud Platform’s revenue stream. The hard part will be for Google to provide integration without being accused of Amazon-style lock-in. Google can do so by highlighting value-adds in its public cloud that aren’t about proprietary feature sets, but rather deploying items at scale and with great convenience.
OpenStack is only as good as its members, and Google will certainly add great value to it. We’ll just have to wait and see if OpenStack will add some value for Google.
