The Open Cloud and innovation

Google is making waves and building a reputation as the Open Cloud. Building on the core belief that developers should want to use GCP, Google consistently adopts and drives open standards and open source tools and frameworks. By open sourcing projects such as Kubernetes and TensorFlow, these projects are able to grow rapidly and organically. Instead of creating vendor lock-in, Google is then able to capitalize on these open source projects by providing the best developer experience on top of them, as seen in Kubernetes Engine and Cloud Machine Learning.

By adopting and adhering to open standards, Google further reduces the risk of vendor lock-in, and provides a lower barrier to entry for teams looking to move to managed services. This can be seen in a number of products, such as Cloud Bigtable, which adheres to the open-source Apache HBase interface, and Cloud Endpoints, which adheres to the OpenAPI specification. By working together with the wider community, Google creates a transparent, symbiotic relationship with developers that facilitates progress throughout the technology industry.

In addition to driving open sourcing and open standards, Google Cloud continuously innovates on ways to make more solutions feasible for organizations of all sizes. By providing per-second billing on compute resources, more teams can afford to build out massive-scale solutions such as spinning up hundreds of virtual machines for short-lived but intensive workloads. Innovating on the traditional approach of provisioning virtual machines, Google offers custom machine types that help developers optimize their use of cloud resources. With very competitive pricing, automatically applied sustained-usage discounts, proactive alerting on underutilized resources, and generous free tiers, Google helps teams minimize costs. Very often, Google Cloud is not just the best choice; it's the cheapest.