Google Cloud announces 7 open source partners, Seoul and Salt Lake City regions

At Google Cloud Next 2019 today, Google signed strategic partnerships with seven “leading open source-centric companies”: Confluent, DataStax, Elastic, InfluxData, MongoDB, Neo4j, and Redis Labs. Each partnership has its own timeline, but the company expects them all to roll out “over the next few months.” Google also announced new Google Cloud Platform (GCP) regions opening in 2020: Seoul and Salt Lake City.

Google says it believes in an “open cloud” and that “open source is the future of public cloud.” Indeed, the company has made open source contributions via projects like Kubernetes, TensorFlow, Go, and so on. But Google doesn’t want to just open-source its own projects — it also wants to partner with companies that are building open source projects.

Google will be offering fully managed services for these partners that are tightly integrated into GCP. That means a single user interface (including the ability to provision and manage the service from the Google Cloud Console), unified billing (one invoice from Google Cloud that includes the partners’ services), and Google Cloud support (manage and log support tickets in a single window). Google will also work with its partners to build integrations with native GCP services like Stackdriver and IAM, validating for security and optimizing performance.

Data management and analytics partnerships

Google hopes that this will make it easier for enterprise customers to build on open source technologies. The seven partnerships are all data management and analytics company — here is how Google describes them:

• Confluent: Founded by the team that built Apache Kafka, Confluent builds an event streaming platform that lets companies easily access data as real-time streams.
• DataStax: Powers enterprises with its always-on, distributed cloud database built on Apache Cassandra and designed for hybrid cloud.
• Elastic: As the creators of the Elastic Stack, Elastic builds self-managed and SaaS offerings that make data usable in real time and at scale for search use cases, like logging, security, and analytics.
• InfluxData: Its time series platform can instrument, observe, learn and automate any system, application, and business process across a variety of use cases. InfluxDB is an open-source time series database optimized for fast, high-availability storage and retrieval of time series data in fields such as operations monitoring, application metrics, IoT sensor data, and real-time analytics.
• MongoDB: A modern, general-purpose database platform that brings software and data to developers and the applications they build, with a flexible model and control over data location.
• Neo4j is a native graph database platform specifically optimized to map, store, and traverse networks of highly connected data to reveal invisible contexts and hidden relationships. By analyzing data points and the connections between them, Neo4j powers real-time applications.
• Redis Labs: The home of Redis, the world’s most popular in-memory database, and commercial provider of Redis Enterprise. It offers performance, reliability, and flexibility for personalization, machine learning, IoT, search, e-commerce, social, and metering solutions worldwide.

Google says its customers regularly ask to use open source technology in a cloud-native way. By offering a similar experience to its native GCP services, the company is delivering on that request at scale.

New cloud regions in 2020

Google is already planning to open an Osaka, Japan region in the coming weeks and last month announced a Jakarta, Indonesia region will launch in the first half of 2020. But this is Google Cloud Next, where the company always has more regions to announce.

Google will be adding cloud regions in Seoul, South Korea (its eighth in Asia Pacific) and Salt Lake City, Utah (its sixth in the U.S.) in 2020. The company didn’t give exact dates, merely saying that the Seoul region will be usable “in early 2020” followed by the Salt Lake City region “shortly thereafter.” Each new cloud region will offer three zones at launch and will include key GCP products.

Google Cloud Platform is currently in 19 regions (cloud locations). If you add the announced regions, the number grows to 23. Oh, and Google promised there will be “more region announcements” this year.

The big three cloud providers count regions differently, so they’re not easy to compare. But for the record, Amazon currently advertises 20 AWS regions and Microsoft markets 54 Azure regions.