This was a big piece of news last week. There are some that even are suggesting (but not really) that the Google stock jumped drastically as a result of this announcement, I personally find that just a good joke (and some wishful thinking).

A snippet from the Google post:

As we look to the future of computing in the enterprise, we see two important trends emerging.

The first is a move towards the hybrid cloud.  Few enterprises can move their entire infrastructure to the public cloud. For most, hybrid deployments will be the norm and OpenStack is emerging as a standard for the on-premises component of these deployments.

For me this is a gauntlet thrown directly in the face of AWS.

Amazon has always pushed that everything should and can run in the public cloud. They have never believed in the hybrid cloud model. It was all AWS or nothing. I have never agreed with this statement, and still don’t.

There will always be things that need to run in house – for a number of possible reasons:

• security
• regulation
• the nature of the workload
• politics

AWS has tried over the years to provide adaptations/solutions and tools to ease the journey into the private cloud – such as VPC or Direct Connect to enable you to extend your datacenter to the public cloud – but still have it feel as if it was in-house. But that is not hybrid.

I think that this is a great move on Google’s part and their ‘bear-hug’ of OpenStack.

It will be interesting to see what this collaboration brings into the OpenStack world.