It’s no accident that Google LLC has created such a large network of loyal software developers as the search engine titan takes on enterprise cloud computing services. Much of its success in this arena has been going against the grain and doing what traditional businesses would say is dangerous — sharing your resources and opening them freely to the community.

By making much of its advanced software available to the wider developer community through industry-shaking open source initiatives, the company is actually able to evolve quickly and nurture a community willing to support its progress. While many companies today are driven by short-term revenue out of necessity, Google is able to play the long game in enterprise by driving adoption of its products built on the skill and knowledge of some of the world’s brightest minds.

“For something like Kubernetes and Istio, Google sort of bootstrapped that and then donated it to the community,” said Jennifer Lin (pictured), director of product management at Google Cloud, speaking of the open-sourced tools for orchestrating containerized applications and managing microservices. “Since then, we’ve seen just incredible participation at things like KubeCon and developer hackathons, etc. That’s both a model for growing the community but also just to educate and share a lot of the best practices in a different type of way than most software companies.”

Lin spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Google Cloud Next event in San Francisco. They discussed Kubernetes, Istio, multicloud trends, open source impacts and more. (* Disclosure below.)

Multicloud adaptability and control

Google sees multicloud as the future, as the company has seen first hand through dealings with companies such as IBM and ride-sharing platform Lyft that customers do not want to be locked down to one cloud provider. By following the pluggable adaptable model, it becomes much easier to allow companies their choice in providers for each cloud service, according to Lin.

Now that there is workload portability, a common abstraction layer, and a single point of administrative control, there’s a lot companies can do in the cloud, Lin pointed out.

“Using some of these innovative technologies with containerization, you don’t have to worry about the kernel version in the OS and a lot of the toil that was in the system before,” Lin concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Google Cloud Next event. (* Disclosure: Google Cloud sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Google Cloud nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE