Bringing the best of open source to Google Cloud customers

Google’s belief in an open cloud stems from our deep commitment to open source. We believe open source is an essential part of the public cloud: It’s the foundation of IT infrastructure worldwide and has been a part of Google’s foundation since day one. This is reflected in our contributions to projects like Kubernetes, TensorFlow, Go, and many more.

Today, we’re taking our commitment to open source to the next level by announcing strategic partnerships with leading open source-centric companies in the areas of data management and analytics, including:

• Confluent
• DataStax
• Elastic
• InfluxData
• MongoDB
• Neo4j
• Redis Labs

We’ve always seen our friends in the open-source community as equal collaborators, and not simply a resource to be mined. With that in mind, we’ll be offering managed services operated by these partners that are tightly integrated into Google Cloud Platform (GCP), providing a seamless user experience across management, billing and support. This makes it easier for our enterprise customers to build on open source technologies, and it delivers on our commitment to continually support and grow these open source communities.

Making open source even more accessible with a cloud-native experience

The open-source database market is big, and growing fast. According to SearchDataManagement.com, “more than 70% of new applications developed by corporate users will run on an open source database management system, and half of the existing relational database installations built on commercial DBMS technologies will be converted to open source platforms or [are] in the process of being converted."

This mirrors what we hear from our customers—that you want to be able to use open-source technology easily and in a cloud-native way. The partnerships we are announcing today make this possible by offering an elevated experience similar to Google’s native services. It also means that you aren’t locked in or out when you are using these technologies—we think that’s important for our customers and our partners.

Here are some of the benefits these partnerships will offer:

• Fully managed services running in the cloud, with best efforts made to optimize performance and latency between the service and application.
• A single user interface to manage apps, which includes the ability to provision and manage the service from the Google Cloud Console.
• Unified billing, so you get one invoice from Google Cloud that includes the partner’s service.
• Google Cloud support for the majority of these partners, so you can manage and log support tickets in a single window and not have to deal with different providers.

To further our mission of making GCP the best destination for open source-based services, we will work with our partners to build integrations with native GCP services like Stackdriver for monitoring and IAM, validate these services for security, and optimize performance for users.

Partnering with leaders in open source

The partners we are announcing today include several of the top-ranked databases in their respective categories. We’re working alongside these creators and supporting the growth of these companies’ technologies to inspire strong customer experiences and adoption. These new partners include:

Confluent: Founded by the team that built Apache Kafka, Confluent builds an event streaming platform that lets companies easily access data as real-time streams. Learn more.

DataStax: DataStax powers enterprises with its always-on, distributed cloud database built on Apache Cassandra and designed for hybrid cloud. Learn more.

Elastic: As the creators of the Elastic Stack, Elastic builds self-managed and SaaS offerings that make data usable in real time and at scale for search use cases, like logging, security, and analytics. Learn more.

InfluxData: InfluxData’s time series platform can instrument, observe, learn and automate any system, application and business process across a variety of use cases. InfluxDB (developed by InfluxData) is an open-source time series database optimized for fast, high-availability storage and retrieval of time series data in fields such as operations monitoring, application metrics, IoT sensor data, and real-time analytics. Learn more.

MongoDB: MongoDB is a modern, general-purpose database platform that brings software and data to developers and the applications they build, with a flexible model and control over data location. Learn more.

Neo4j: Neo4j is a native graph database platform specifically optimized to map, store, and traverse networks of highly connected data to reveal invisible contexts and hidden relationships. By analyzing data points and the connections between them, Neo4j powers real-time applications. Learn more.

Redis Labs: Redis Labs is the home of Redis, the world’s most popular in-memory database, and commercial provider of Redis Enterprise. It offers performance, reliability, and flexibility for personalization, machine learning, IoT, search, e-commerce, social, and metering solutions worldwide. Learn more.

We’re pleased to bring these partner technologies to you. Partnering with the companies that invest in developing open-source technologies means you get benefits like expertise in operating these services at scale, additional enterprise features, and shorter cycles in bringing the latest innovation to the cloud. 

We look forward to seeing what you build with these open source technologies. Learn more here about open source on GCP.

By Chris DiBona, Director, Open Source and Kevin Ichhpurani, Corporate VP, Global Ecosystem and Business Development

Cross-posted from the Google Cloud Blog

Season of Docs now accepting organization applications

The newly launched Season of Docs program is excited to announce that organization applications are now open!

Deadline for organization applications:
April 23, 2019 at 20:00 UTC. 

Documentation is essential to the adoption of open source projects as well as to the success of their communities. Consequently, Season of Docs was created to bring together technical writers and open source projects to foster collaboration and improve documentation in the open source space. You can find out more about the program on the introduction page of the website.

How does my organization apply to take part in Season of Docs?

Open source organizations can now submit applications to participate in Season of Docs. First, read the organization administrator guide and guidelines for creating an organization application on the Season of Docs website.

Organizations can submit their applications here: https://forms.gle/axk8AvV561K2cT6S6.

Your organization application should include one or more projects that you would like a technical writer to work on. Take a look at the examples of project ideas, then describe one or more specific projects based on your open source project’s actual documentation needs. Your goal is to attract technical writers to your organization, making them feel comfortable about approaching the organization and excited about what they can achieve in collaboration with your mentors.

Reach out to your community members to see who would like to be a mentor for Season of Docs. They may also have great suggestions for project ideas. Mentors don’t need technical writing skills. Instead, they are members of the open source organization who know the value of good documentation and who are experienced in your organization’s processes and tools. See the guidelines on working with a technical writer.

Once you have selected mentors for your organization, have them register with Season of Docs using this form: https://forms.gle/a1x26WQGzURLerv66.

Organization applications close on April 23 at 20:00 UTC.

If you have any questions about the program, please email us at season-of-docs-support@googlegroups.com.

General timeline

• April 2-23: Open source organizations apply to take part in Season of Docs
• April 30: Google publishes the list of accepted mentoring organizations, along with their ideas for documentation projects
• April 30 - June 28: Technical writers choose the project they’d like to work on and submit their proposals to Season of Docs 
• July 30: Google announces the accepted technical writer projects
• August 1 - September 1: Community bonding: Technical writers get to know mentors and the open source community, and refine their projects in collaboration with their mentors
• September 2 - November 29: Technical writers work with open source mentors on the accepted projects, and submit their work at the end of the period
• December 10: Google publishes the list of successfully-completed projects.

See the full timeline for details, including the provision for projects that run longer than three months.

Join us

Explore the Season of Docs website at g.co/seasonofdocs to learn more about participating in the program. Check out our mailing lists and Slack to get more information and join the community. Use our logo and other promotional resources to spread the word. Examine the timeline, check out the FAQ, and apply now!

By Andrew Chen, Google Open Source and Sarah Maddox, Google Technical Writer

Open sourcing Science Journal iOS

Google’s Science Journal app enables you to use the sensors in your mobile devices to perform science experiments. We believe anyone can be a scientist anywhere. Science doesn’t just happen in the classroom or lab—tools like Science Journal let you see how the world works with just your phone. From learning about sound and motion to discovering how atmospheric pressure works, Science Journal helps you understand and measure the world around you.

We’re extremely excited to announce that we’re open sourcing this powerful science tool. We know the heart of science is not just critical thinking, but also knowledge sharing, building on discoveries, and learning about the world. Have a student with a knack for building things? Do you want to learn how mobile applications are put together? Download our source code, make changes and discoveries, and then deploy the newly-modified app to your own iOS device.

Why open source?

Inquiring minds are always asking, “How does this work?” With our open source app, there are many science and engineering topics to explore! For example, we use the Fast Fourier transform in our iOS code, but you may ask “how did you do that?” Because you can see our source code, you can discover-- not just that we used the Fast Fourier transform-- but how the algorithm works. We also make it possible to graph many sensor values in realtime and now you can see exactly how we’ve made that possible.

If you aren’t an iOS or Android engineer, don’t fret! You can even learn how apps are put together so you can build your own. Learning from, and making modifications to, open source code has helped countless Google engineers explore complicated topics and learn new skills.



Have you ever wished you could do something with Science Journal that it doesn’t currently do? Do you have an idea for building a new sensor and displaying its data in Science Journal? Maybe you’ve wanted to experiment with changing colors or fonts in the app, or even changing the Science Journal app icon to be a labrador with a lab coat? Now you can, by forking our repo, making changes, and committing them in your fork!

If you think your changes are amazing and should be included in Google’s Science Journal App, read our contribution guide. But if you want to keep your changes to yourself and your friends, well, that’s cool too! We’d love to see what you’ve built, so you can tweet at us @GScienceJournal, or just use the #myScienceJournal hashtag on Twitter.

By Joshua Liebowitz, iOS Tech Lead