Google shows cloud customers it's happy to have an open relationship

Google says it is trying to make life a little easier for organizations working with multiple public cloud platforms. Under Cross-Cloud Interconnect, the Chocolate Factory will provision customers a dedicated physical connection between its cloud and another provider.

Multi-cloud is very much the norm these days, with Mountain View quoting an IDC study that found 64 percent of enterprise customers were using multiple public cloud providers for infrastructure services, and 79 percent were seeking some way to simplify management of their cloud resources.

Google's new service links its cloud rig with other public clouds via a high speed network connection, letting organizations operate applications that may span multiple clouds.

While it is common for cloud providers to offer a high-speed private connection between their public cloud and a customer's on-premises network, it is less so for a cloud company to offer a dedicated link to a rival.

Google claims other options for setting up multi-cloud connectivity are limited and complex to configure. One is for a customer to deploy a router into a colocation facility and then connect it to the networks of the cloud service providers, but this could prove expensive and time consuming.

Cross-Cloud Interconnect is being made available as a fully managed service via Google resellers in numerous locations around the world, said Google VP and GM of Product Management Muninder Sambi.

Out of the starting block, Cross-Cloud Interconnect supports connections to Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, and Alibaba Cloud. Sambi said "support will be added for additional cloud providers based on customer demand."

When a customer buys Cross-Cloud Interconnect, Google provisions a dedicated physical connection between its network and that of the other cloud provider. The customer can use this connection to peer their Google Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) network with their resources hosted on the other public cloud, according to Google.

• Google veep calls out Microsoft's cloud software licensing 'tax'
• Google Cloud upgrades with next-gen accelerator that embiggens its VMs
• Gartner: Stop worrying and love the cloud, with all its outages and lock-in
• Google Cloud's watery Parisian outage enters third week, with no end in sight

Taking this further, Google also claims that if a customer has resources on Microsoft Azure and others hosted on AWS, the organization could set up a Cross-Cloud Interconnect to each of these, after which they would be able to use their Google network to transfer data between Azure and AWS.

The service is available with 10Gbps or 100Gbps connections and has the same features as Cloud Interconnect - Google's service that provides a direct connection between its cloud and a customer premises - but does not require new customer hardware and is backed with a claimed 99.99 percent service level agreement (SLA).

After the connection is established, Google supports the connection up to the point where it reaches the other cloud provider's network, however it cannot, understandably, guarantee uptime from the other cloud provider.

Google highlights Walmart as one customer given early access to this multi-cloud managed service.

In a canned statement, Gerald Bothello, Walmart senior director of software engineering, said: "Walmart runs a seamless platform across multiple cloud providers to accelerate innovations." He claimed it was able to "simplify connectivity between cloud providers, shorten time to production, and reduce overall costs" with Cross-Cloud Interconnect.

As one of the big three cloud providers, Google increased its share of enterprise cloud spending during the final quarter of 2022, though only slightly, up 1 percent from the same period a year earlier.

Google's cloud business announced its first profit back in April. In results for the quarter ended March 31, Mountain View's cloud reported $7.4 billion of revenue and operating income of $191 million. This follows a loss of 14.6 billion for the three years to 2021. ®