Google Inc. said last week that it’s teaming up with the startup Elastic to offer fully managed versions of that company’s Elasticsearch and Kibana open-source search software on its cloud platform.

Elasticsearch is a search engine for structured and unstructured data, while Kibana provides a dashboard for Elasticsearch as well as data visualizations. What the partnership means is that Google Cloud Platform customers will be able to take advantage of Elastic’s tools, combining it with the improved data analytics and machine learning capabilities of Google’s cloud, as well as hardened security features.

Google said the Elastic suite of services will be made available for developers later this year. Those that take advantage will be able to access a hosted and managed version of both Elasticsearch and Kibana, as well as support from Elastic’s engineers.

In a blog post, Google offered an example of how the two companies’ technologies can be used together. It revealed how Quizlet, which is a website that offers online learning tools, uses Google Cloud Platform’s storage and compute services, while drawing on Elasticsearch to carry out advanced queries of billions of terms and provide an immediate response to users.

Google said the combination of its Cloud Platform and Elastic’s tools is designed to enable customers to manage and scale Elasticsearch based on their requirements, with Kibana being used to provide meaningful visualizations of their search results.

Nan Boden, head of global technology partners for Google Cloud, said in a blog post that the chance to give its cloud customers access to popular open-source technologies like Elasticsearch was an important factor in its decision to partner with the startup.

“Openness is a key pillar of our partner philosophy and a driving force across Google,” she said. “Embracing partnerships and working collaboratively with best-of-breed open source technology allows us to offer our customers choice and flexibility. We want GCP to be the best place to collaborate and solve problems using open source technologies.”

Elastic boasts a number of heavyweight customers, including Dell Technologies Inc., Facebook Inc. and Netflix Inc. Meanwhile, shared customers of both Elastic and Google include the New York Times, eBay Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc.

Last month, Elastic said Elasticsearch had broken the 100 million download milestone, up from 50 million downloads one year ago. The company took the opportunity then to announce a number of new features for its Elastic Stack, which include cloud enterprise, machine learning and new features for Kibana that help to visualize and describe data analytics results.

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