Why we believe in an open cloud
Openness enables faster innovation, tighter security, and offers freedom from vendor lock-in. Google believes openness matters more in the cloud than ever.
Open is about the power to pick up and move your app
An open cloud is grounded in a belief that being tied to a particular cloud shouldn’t get in the way of achieving your goals. An open cloud embraces the idea that the power to deliver your apps to different clouds while using a common development and operations approach will help you meet whatever your priority is at any given time — whether that’s making the most of skills shared widely across your teams or rapidly accelerating innovation. Open source is an enabler of open clouds because open source in the cloud preserves your control over where you deploy your IT investments. For example, customers are using Kubernetes to manage containers and TensorFlow to build machine learning models on premises and on multiple clouds.
Open source is a continuum
Here are examples of Google’s commitment to OSS and the varying levels of work required:
- OSS such as Android has an open code base and development is the sole responsibility of one organization
- OSS with community-driven changes such as TensorFlow involves coordination between many companies and individuals
- OSS with community-driven strategy, for example Linux and Kubernetes, involves collaborative decision-making and accepting consensus over control
Open source software permits a richness of thought and continuous feedback loop with users
Open source is so important to Google that we call it out twice in our corporate philosophies and we encourage employees, and in fact all developers, to engage with open source.
In 2019, over 10,000 Googlers were active in over 70,000 open source repositories hosted on GitHub and git-on-borg. On GitHub, Googlers created over 570,000 issues, opened over 150,000 pull requests, and created more than 36,000 push events. Visit our blog for more details on Google's 2019 open source contributions.
Googlers are active contributors to popular projects you may have heard of including Linux, LLVM, Samba, and Git.
Google regularly open sources some of our best internal projects
Top Google-initiated projects include:
Google is committed to the use of open APIs
Open APIs preserve everyone’s ability to build on each other’s work, improving software iteratively and collaboratively. Open APIs empower companies and individual developers and to change service providers at will. Peer-reviewed research shows that open APIs drive faster innovation across the industry and in any given ecosystem. Open APIs depend on the right to reuse established APIs by creating independent-yet-compatible implementations. Google Cloud is committed to supporting open APIs via our membership in the Open API Initiative, involvement in the Open API specification, support of gRPC, and via Cloud Bigtable compatibility with the HBase API, Cloud Spanner and BigQuery compatibility with SQL:2011 (with extensions), and Cloud Storage compatibility with shared APIs.
Watch the day-three keynote about openness from Google Cloud Next 2017
Open source spotlight
Open source system for container orchestration
Google dedicated over 12 years of research and development resources to Kubernetes, and then made it completely open source. That combination of tight, directed engineering, openness, and community building has helped make Kubernetes one of the most active projects on GitHub, with more than 115,500 commits and 810,500 contributions — and counting. This astounding rate of innovation is only possible thanks to the cross industry collaboration and leadership in the Kubernetes community. Learn more about the Kubernetes open source project and about Google Kubernetes Engine, our managed service that’s the best environment for deploying containerized applications.
Open source library for machine learning
Since Google open-sourced it in 2015, TensorFlow has become the #1 machine learning community on GitHub, and the de facto machine learning toolkit. This project is important for mankind, so we knew we had to open source it to enable everyone to openly collaborate on it. Learn more about the TensorFlow open-source project and about our managed service, Google Cloud Machine Learning Engine, which is simply the best way to take any TensorFlow model and perform large scale training on a managed cluster.
An open platform to connect microservices
Istio is an open platform that provides a uniform way to connect, manage, and secure microservices. Istio supports managing traffic flows between microservices, enforcing access policies, and aggregating telemetry data, all without requiring changes to the microservice code.
Android uses the latest Google innovations, from machine learning for virus detection and cloud security to artificial intelligence for smart, contextual assistance. Learn more on the Android Enterprise Mobility Management webpage.