Google will launch an Elasticsearch cloud service in second half of 2017

Google today announced that it has inked a partnership with startup Elastic to offer a fully managed version of the Elasticsearch and Kibana open-source software that the startup sells and supports. The core Elasticsearch is a search engine for structured and unstructured data, while Kibana provides a compatible search dashboard and visualizations.

In addition to providing what’s available for free, Google’s service will include features that are only available with the startup’s high-end subscriptions, like graph analytics, alerts, and commercial support. The service will arrive in the second half of 2017, Elastic said in a blog post.

In other words, the service will be showing up around two years after public cloud market leader Amazon Web Services (AWS) released an Elasticsearch service. But there was no formal deal between Amazon and Elastic. That service remains available alongside Elastic’ dedicated offering on the AWS Marketplace and AWS’ own Amazon CloudSearch service. On the Microsoft Azure public cloud you can use Elastic’s offering from the Azure Marketplace or Microsoft’s own Azure Search.

The New York Times, Shopify, Quizlet, and Verizon all do business with both Elastic and Google, Nan Boden, head of global technology partners at Google Cloud, wrote in a blog post.

Today’s announcement comes a few weeks after Google said its cloud would be getting an embedded version of Trifacta’s data cleaning software.

In addition to expanding its portfolio of services, Google wants to be seen as the best cloud for companies’ new and existing applications and is therefore expanding its geographical reach and refreshing its underlying infrastructure. For example, yesterday Google said it would be contributing to the development of an undersea cable in the Indian Ocean that will speed up data transfer in the region for cloud customers.

Elastic, for its part, most recently raised funding in 2014, when it closed a $70 million round. Other search offerings include Algolia, Lucene/Solr, and Swiftype.

In addition to the Elasticsearch announcement, Google also said that it’s bringing its neural machine translation system to the standard edition of its Translation application programming interface (API). For the past few months this cutting-edge machine translation system was only accessible through a premium edition of the API. The service currently works with Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Hebrew, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Thai, Turkish, and Vietnamese, with more languages to come, Google product manager Apoorv Saxena wrote in a blog post.