Google is joining the OpenStack Foundation as a corporate sponsor in a symbolic gesture of support for open source.
The company’s focus will be on Linux containers and integrating technologies like Kubernetes through projects such as OpenStack Magnum.
Kubernetes, the next generation container orchestrator, is likely one of Google’s main strategic reasons for signing on with the foundation. The company could well be making a play to make it the standard container manager in both OpenStack and its own platform.
This would mean that businesses would be able to move workloads between on-premise OpenStack clouds and use Google’s public cloud to scale out.
This hybrid interoperability represents a growing demand from businesses and marks a trend for large public cloud platforms to integrate with on-premise solutions.
Rackspace recently announced its expanded support for Microsoft Azure, giving companies the ability to speed up deployments of Azure.
Craig McLuckie, Product Manager, Google, said of 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.
"The second trend is a move towards container-oriented computing. 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.
"Recently, through the Kubernetes project, we have started bringing these patterns to the open source community."
