Google Reveals Its 10 'Need-To-Know' Technology Partners
On A Need-To-Know Basis
Google is playing catch-up in the public cloud wars, but 2014 was the year the Mountain View, Calif.-based tech giant made strides in building out a cloud platform positioned to compete with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and IBM SoftLayer.
One of the strengths of the Google Cloud Platform is a rapidly expanding ecosystem of technology partners working alongside Google to integrate the features and functionality that developers, number crunchers, solution providers and enterprise IT managers are seeking.
CRN asked Google for a list of its "need-to-know" technology partners. Here's what the company had to say.
GitHub
CEO: Chris Wanstrath
GitHub is the most popular repository with developers looking to publish or pull source code, and early last year Google Cloud Platform enabled click-to-deploy support for software hosted on the service.
By connecting a project being built in App Engine to a repository and pushing to the project’s master branch on GitHub, users can trigger an immediate deployment.
Fastly
CEO: Artur Bergman
A few years back, this startup shook up the market by introducing solid-state drives to speed up the delivery of dynamic Web content.
More recently, Fastly brought to market a service called Cloud Accelerator that interconnects directly with Google Cloud Platform, dramatically improving content delivery and performance at the edge.
When introducing Cloud Accelerator in November, Fastly reported that the new product, running on Google's infrastructure, achieves four times faster response times for content requests than when running on rival clouds.
Bitnami
CEO: Daniel Lopez
Bitnami showed attendees of November's Google Cloud Platform Live event its new offering, Launchpad for Cloud Platform. Launchpad delivers easy access to a server software app store containing almost 100 cloud images, including popular open-source applications such as Wordpress and Joomla.
With a single click, users can deploy onto the Google Cloud Platform common open-source applications and development environments from a library of images.
Tableau
CEO: Christian Chabot
Tableau is widely regarded as one of the most popular data visualization services on the market. Google BigQuery integrates directly into the Tableau interface for versions 8.0 and above.
The direct connection puts the power of BigQuery into the hands of everyday users, facilitating fast and interactive visual analysis against hundreds of millions of rows of data with simple drag-and-drop actions.
SendGrid
CEO: Sameer Dholakia
SendGrid, an email delivery and management service, can be used to power email on Google App Engine.
The service can improve deliverability and provide transparency into what happens to emails automatically sent by applications. Statistics on opens, clicks, unsubscribes and spam reports are available through either the SendGrid interface or its API.
SendGrid sweetens the deal by offering App Engine users 25,000 free emails every month.
MapR
CEO: John Schroeder
MapR has fully integrated its powerful, secure and fault-tolerant Apache Hadoop distribution with Google Cloud Platform, allowing users to quickly deploy a Hadoop cluster onto Google's cloud infrastructure.
With such a deployment on Google Compute Engine, MapR set a world record for MinuteSort -- a standard benchmark test for how much data a system can sort in one minute. MapR clocked a blazing 1.5 TB in 59 seconds, surpassing the previous record of 1.4 TB in the same time.
Bime Analytics
CEO: Rachel Delacour
Bime Analytics, a SaaS solution for business intelligence, analytics and data visualization, offers a connector integrating live queries from BigQuery with its own interactive data analysis dashboards.
In addition to the BigQuery connector, Bime provides several other connectors for on-premise databases as well as Google Analytics and Google Spreadsheets.
DataStax
CEO: Billy Bosworth
One-quarter of the Fortune 100 are customers of DataStax, which sells an enterprise distribution of the Apache Cassandra database management system.
The developer's flagship product, DataStax Enterprise, was tested and validated to run on Google Cloud Platform in 2013 and since then, Google has continued to work with DataStax to optimize the product in its cloud.
The partner recently achieved 1 million writes per second on Compute Engine using DataStax Cassandra 2.2.
Canonical/Ubuntu
CEO: Jane Silber
Canonical's extremely popular Linux distribution is one of the newest additions to Google's cloud ecosystem, with Ubuntu images optimized for Google Cloud Platform released in November for beta testing.
The images will be maintained by Canonical and feature both Canonical and Google authored optimizations to improve the performance on Compute Engine without breaking compatibility.
Red Hat
CEO: James Whitehurst
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host has been available in preview on Google Compute Engine since July, moving into public beta this past November.
The lean, Docker-friendly OS provides a streamlined host platform that is optimized to run application containers. It also includes Kubernetes, Google's open-source container management project.
Red Hat was an early Kubernetes supporter and has contributed to almost every component of the Kubernetes stack.
MongoDB
CEO: Dev Ittycheria
MongoDB's NoSQL offering is ranked the fifth most popular database management system overall by DB-Engines, but it's the highest-ranked non-relational database on that list and is growing faster than any other competitor.
MongoDB NoSQL can be deployed with a single click on Google's cloud. MongoDB and the Google Cloud Platform team also have developed a number of resources to help developers get the most out of the software.