Lost in hype surrounding VMware Inc.’s recent move to embrace Docker, which is considered one of the single greatest threats to its proprietary brand of server virtualization, was the equally significant announcement of a partnership with Google to provide support for the search giant’s Kubernetes initiative.

The open-source project relies on the Docker container engine for application delivery. It has gained considerable traction since hitting the scene just a few months ago. That got the hypervisor maker’s attention.

But there’s much more to the alliance than just two big-name vendors converging around the latest common denominator, according to Google Compute Engine (GCE) Product Manager Craig McLuckie. The collaboration  paves a path for the search titan to extend its cloud presence into the traditional data center, he said in an interview on SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE shortly after the agreement was unveiled,

“Our customers demand choice, they are invested in multi-cloud environments, and we have to find a way to meet them where they are and provide them a framework to move toward a more progressive and more cloud-native way of building their applications,” McLuckie told theCUBE hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante.

Putting engineering muscle to good use

Kubernetes is that framework. The project,  which launched in June, is a free version of the closely-guarded Omega management system that Google uses to distribute workloads around its vast infrastructure. Kubernetes uses Docker to package applications into lightweight virtual containers that can be easily moved between on and off-premise environments, McLuckie explained, thereby effectively removing the barriers that have kept traditional organizations from adopting the search giant’s public cloud platform.

The partnership with VMware is a natural – and necessary – extension of that strategy. The EMC Corp. subsidiary’s hypervisor can be found in the overwhelming majority of virtual enterprise environments, which means it needs to be part of Google’s plans as well. But as important as VMware’s vSphere is, McLuckie said it’s just one aspect of the partnership.

VMware has also become an active contributor to the upstream Kubernetes code base and entered a collaboration with Google to make the tool compatible with Open vSwitch, the industry standard for connecting virtual machines to physical networks.  According to McLuckie, the latter initiative lay the groundwork for making the project compatible with NSX, the hypervisor maker’s attempt to extend the benefits of virtualization beyond servers into the network.

A double-edged sword

The same open-source nature that enables key partners such as VMware to plug their solutions into Kubernetes also plays into the hands of the competition, which can take advantage of the cross-platform capabilities of the project in the same that Google does. And that’s exactly what’s happening, with Microsoft Corp. recently adding support for the tool to its Azure platform-as-a-service, a direct rival of Google Compute Engine.

But the search giant has accepted this as part of the game when it launched the project, according to McLuckie. Not only that, but it’s actively counting on rivals to spread Kubernetes into more markets, an expansion strategy as subtle as it is aggressive.  “We’re incentivized to openness and we find that our customers demand openness,” he detailed. “That creates an environment where we have access to a much broader customer base because they want to run in multiple cloud environments, they want to run with multiple public cloud providers and they want a hybrid cloud environment.”

An inherent edge

Google may embrace the competition as a natural part of the open-source ecosystem, but the search giant is not above slanting the odds in its favor when given the chance. McLuckie said Kubernetes was built from the ground up to take advantage of the unique capabilities included in GCE, optimization that is not yet provided for in rival platforms such as Azure. That will no doubt change as the likes of Microsoft inject more of their code into the project, but Google is banking on what its world-standard operational expertise to help set GCE apart from the competition.

“There’s things you can do at scale that you can’t do anywhere else and we’re going to continue doing that. We reduced prices aggressively recently and we’ll continue to push down the economics,” McLuckie promised.

Watch the full interview below (18:30).