Google’s open source partner play is good business, not “some sort of generous magical deal”

No one does open source better than Google. While Microsoft may have more employees contributing to open source, Google projects like Kubernetes and TensorFlow are reshaping entire industries, helping the world to “run like Google.” As such, it’s perhaps not surprising that the company would announce today that it has assembled a who’s who of open source vendors, including MongoDB, Confluent, and DataStax, to run its software as wholly managed services on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). It would be convenient to think of this as some marketing master stroke to position “hero” GCP against “villain” AWS. It would also be wrong.