
Bringing the best of open source to Google Cloud customers - espeed
https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/open-source/bringing-the-best-of-open-source-to-google-cloud-customers
======
cdbattags
Great move on Google's part marketing-wise with all the discussions about
Amazon using other tools' api layers and then doing whatever they please
underneath without upstreaming. Sure, yes yes, they might just be solving very
specific hardware/network issues for the most part only relevant to their data
centers but still.

Google, please don't let this announcement be marketing fluff alone!

That said, I hope Google/GCP partners with the Postgres team sometime in the
near future as well!

And lastly a sidenote (kind of unrelated): there are enough big players in
Chromium now with Microsoft and their Edge wrapper that just like how V8 is
now, Chromium at el. (the whole "bundle") needs to try and remain as
democratic as possible moving forward. Thinking of [1].

[1]:
[https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=896897...](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=896897&desc=2#c23)

~~~
jeremyjh
> That said, I hope Google/GCP partners with the Postgres team sometime in the
> near future as well!

I had the same thought. Cloud SQL Postgres _still_ does not offer point-in-
time-recovery, which makes it a non-starter for many use-cases.

I'm not sure "the Postgres team" is a commercial entity you can do business
with, and probably one of the best commercial entities, Citus Data - was
recently acquired by Microsoft but there are others I'm sure, but maybe not
any as close to the core team as the companies they announced today.

~~~
drewda
Some other companies that specialize in Postgres support/hosting/commercial
tooling:

\- [https://www.crunchydata.com/](https://www.crunchydata.com/)

\- [https://www.enterprisedb.com/](https://www.enterprisedb.com/)

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capkutay
definitely interesting that google is taking a friendly approach to partners
while AWS is simply forking their code and selling it themselves. It'll be
interesting to see which strategy pays off. Still a decent gap between # of
AWS and GCP customers, but this could help them catch up.

also shameless plug (about as shameless as it gets), but my company is
offering free 90 day database migrations to Google Cloud for customers
actively looking to move their ops to GCP.

[https://www.striim.com/google-cloud-database-migration-
servi...](https://www.striim.com/google-cloud-database-migration-service/)

~~~
tyingq
Somewhat bold because it seems now harder for Google to reverse their stance
than for AWS to reverse theirs.

~~~
mrep
But it now gives Google cloud integrated services that will always have the
newest features whereas the other cloud providers will have to pay to maintain
their in house solutions themselves due to the recent changes in many popular
open source license's.

That leapfrogs AWS and azure in feature parity on those services while also
funding said services further because they get a cut.

Brilliant move IMO and I think it'll be a boom for improving open source
software and increasing competition between the clouds.

~~~
tyingq
Sure, I wasn't saying it was a bad idea, just a bold one. Hard to pull back
with the strong statements in the post... _" equal collaborators, and not
simply a resource to be mined"_

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rob-olmos
It looks like this is only for the paid/enterprise versions of the open-source
software, which is a nice start. However, AWS has had their marketplace as
well with additional hourly charges.

I understand Google has had their own contributions to certain projects, but I
wonder if Google will do anything to differentiate from that and AWS. For
example, add MariaDB to their SQL product and contribute some of the income
back the MariaDB Foundation.

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actuator
This is such a great move on part of Google. Gets them good PR and helps the
companies behind these open source projects. I hope Azure also follows through
and does something like this so it forces AWS's hand eventually.

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ensignavenger
I am glad they are partnering with these open source projects and companies,
but they mention Mongo in their list of open source partners. It is my
understanding that MongoDB is no longer Open Source, and therefore no longer
qualifies to be in such a list of Open Source Open Source centric partners.

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markbnj
Seems like the license brouhaha spurred some changes and new relationships.
Probably not a bad thing.

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holoduke
I still don't like Google benefits from all these opensource projects and
having at the same time an extremely non transparant pricing models which can
change anytime. Plus the fact that they have shady ways of adding your
business to their vendor lock in trickery, is reason enough that I would never
use gcp for our businesses.

~~~
cdbattags
I wish these cloud providers would "open source" their pricing models. I know
some people were probably abusing the hell out of the matrix api but the price
hike is quite insane tbh. Maybe this sounds dumb but it's for this reason that
I go with Digital Ocean for my personal stuff.

For example, something like: compute time + availability + hardware + ?

At least with lambdas you can average out time through individual function
blocks and scope it to hopefully know what pieces of the users code are the
most intensive. Maybe lambda get us closer to this transparency model by
showing us down to the functional block what is costing what.

~~~
jpatokal
The Cloud Billing Catalog API offers programmatic access to all GCP pricing.

[https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/introducing-
cloud...](https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/introducing-cloud-
billing-catalog-api-gcp-pricing-in-real-time)

Re: pricing changes, I presume you're referring to the Distance Matrix API
under Maps? That's rather separate from Cloud, but at the end of the day doing
a lookup of _all_ routes between M places and N places is going to cost Google
M*N more than a single lookup.

Disclaimer: I work at GCP and used to work at Maps (but before the pricing
change, which I was not involved in).

