Google Cloud partners with seven open-source projects, including Elastic, Redis Labs, and MongoDB, to offer fully managed services on GCP in the coming months
@elastic, @DataStax, @MongoDB, @RedisLabs and many others. http://cloud.google.com/... @gcloudpartners : We're strengthening our commitment to grow open-source communities with partnerships offering managed database and analytics services from open-source centric companies, including @confluentinc, @MongoDB, and more → http://cloud.google.com/... #GoogleNext19 http://twitter.com/... Paul Dix / @pauldix : Oh look, we're partnering with @GCPcloud to bring managed @InfluxDB to GCP. Google is great with partnering with open source vendors to provide services and we're really happy to be working with them! http://cloud.google.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Google has spent years building first-party database services on GCP — bringing Cloud SQL, Bigtable and Datastore out of beta in 2016 and shipping Memorystore for Redis in 2018. Today's move flips the model: rather than reimplementing popular open-source data stores itself, Google is handing the managed-service slot to the vendors behind them.
The seven partners named — Elastic, MongoDB, Redis Labs, DataStax, Confluent, InfluxDB and others — are the same projects whose licenses and cloud-hosting terms have been flashpoints between open-source companies and hyperscalers. Announced alongside Cloud Run at Google Next, the partnership push signals GCP competing on openness and vendor collaboration rather than proprietary clones.
First-order effects
- Elastic, MongoDB, Redis Labs, DataStax, Confluent and InfluxData gain managed distribution on GCP within months, letting their customers run those databases as fully managed Google Cloud services without the vendors operating their own infrastructure there.
- GCP's database catalog expands immediately with third-party engines Google no longer has to build and maintain in-house.
Second-order effects
- AWS and Microsoft face pressure to match partner-led managed offerings for the same open-source projects, since enterprises evaluating clouds can now get first-party-grade support for Elastic, MongoDB and Redis stacks on GCP.
- The vendors' own hosted-cloud businesses must now coexist with — and price against — Google-operated versions of their software on one of the largest cloud platforms.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, hyperscalers shift from cloning open-source databases to revenue-sharing partnerships with upstream vendors, changing how open-source companies monetize and reducing the license-tightening incentives that strained vendor-hyperscaler relations.
- Managed-service breadth becomes a partnership-negotiation game: whichever cloud signs the most upstream vendors can differentiate on ecosystem coverage rather than proprietary engineering alone.
The trend: Cloud providers are pivoting from reimplementing open-source databases in-house to partnering directly with the vendors behind them for managed services.