Google LLC today revealed that it’s teaming up with a raft of prominent open-source software companies in a massive expansion of the number of “first class” services available on its public cloud.

Opening its annual Cloud Next conference in San Francisco today, the internet giant announced “strategic partnerships” with Confluent Inc., DataStax Inc., Elastic NV, InfluxData Inc., MongoDB Inc., Neo4J Inc. and Redis Labs Inc. The crux of the announcement is that all of these companies’ products, which are based on open-source technologies, will now be available as managed services on Google’s cloud.

Google said it’s adding these open-source platforms to its cloud in order to provide a more seamless experience for its customers with simple and unified management, billings and support services. Google will fully manage each service, with users accessing them via a single user interface from the Google Cloud Console. The services will all be billed via a single invoice.

In other words, services such as DataStax’s Apache Cassandra database will be packaged and sold in a similar fashion to Google’s own database services.

“The idea is to make it very easy to buy these services on GCP,” Manvinder Singh, head of infrastructure partnerships at Google, said in a press briefing. “The experience will be just like our first-party offerings. It essentially makes them first-class services on our platform.”

This is seen by many as quite a different approach from some other public cloud companies, such as Amazon Web Services Inc., which sells open source software as third-party offerings but doesn’t provide much by way of management or support. Amazon also has a habit of taking open source software and creating its own rival products based on it, such as it did with DocumentDB, which is a service based on MongoDB’s NoSQL database service.

Although Amazon has made moves to open up to the open-source community, Google clearly aims to trumpet its open-source chops to partner with such companies instead of competing with them, and said plans to take a hands-on approach just as it does with its own services.

“We want to provide a window for customers to come and resolve issues,” Singh explained. “These companies obviously have a lot more expertise in their respective technology areas, so we’ll be working jointly to resolve customer issues.”

James Kobielus, an analyst with SiliconANGLE sister research firm Wikibon, said the announcements acknowledges the role of open source as the foundation of most cloud applications today. “By partnering with leading open-source vendors and providing unified management, billing, and support for their platforms’ various managed services, Google is taking much of the pain out of deploying a wide range of open-source data environments within its public cloud,” he said.

The partnerships are important for Google because for a long time it has been criticized for not really understanding the needs of the enterprise and therefore not adequately serving such companies, said Holger Mueller, an analyst with Constellation Research Inc. But these criticisms are probably unfair on Google at this juncture, he said, since today’s announcement shows that it does indeed understand what enterprises want.

“This is exactly what executives want to run their next-generation applications,” Mueller said. “As with all new offerings, we now have to see what interest there is. But Google has certainly brought some very high-in-demand partners to the table.

But Mueller noted that joint support efforts are tricky. “The devil always lies in the details, but it is nothing that Google and it’s partners cannot sort out,” he said.

The open-source services will be sold via the Google Cloud Marketplace and integrated with native Google services such as Stackdriver for monitoring and Cloud Identity & Access Management for security purposes when they become available in the next few months.

With reporting from Robert Hof

Image: Google