As Google becomes an important part of the OpenStack community, the company is looking to be identified as the open cloud.
McLuckie, said: "We are legitimately invested in being an open cloud. We are building our next generation of products in the open as open source projects, we were the first of the big three cloud providers to get serious about OpenStack – we are the open cloud and we’re invested in that."
Identifying the benefits of being open, he said: "With an open source project like the way we’ve done you get to market as quickly as you can, work with the folks and it creates far faster turnaround cycles.
"The actual feedback cycle becomes almost instantaneous because you discuss the design in the open with the community and you get immediate feedback from a handful of folks that are keen to work with you. It makes it much more real much quicker."
Not only does he see being open as one of its key characteristics, he also identifies the company as being the innovative cloud.
"We are the innovative cloud. If you think about what Google’s done historically from a technology perspective, we have been the pioneers in a lot of things that have become mainstream over-time but really started at Google.
"You look at things like Hadoop – it was spawned off a paper we wrote, the Map Reduce paper. You look at things like the NoSql databases – that was spawned off our big table paper.
"We’ve historically driven a tremendous amount of innovation into the community, the difference now is that instead of us publishing a paper around this next gen technology, we’re building it in the open."
Not only does he believe this is the case but he feels that if you want to participate in innovation, that his company is the only place to do it.
Cloud adoption is being identified as heading into a second wave, moving past solving an infrastructure provisioning problem by making it available on demand, and heading into making systems more efficient.
McLuckie identifies that Google went through this phase itself as it had successful disasters before introducing Borg, and he sees similarities in the enterprise.
"Enterprises are being faced with a lot of the same challenges. They want to have their developers focus more on the business problems but they have to deal with larger and large amounts of data as the tech penetrated deeper into the business.
"They are becoming internet companies in a way. What we’ve learned is that this is the only way to run, through co-evolution, and this is demonstrably the only way to run internet scale. I think it’s extremely relevant to enterprise."
While cloud may be heading into a second wave, he believes there is a long way to go for enterprises to get the value out of cloud.
"I think there’s a long way to go. I think they are getting legitimate value out of cloud right now and its solving an infrastructure and elasticity problem. It’s also creating an ecosystem, so it’s creating an environment where it’s easy to find and consume software and a place where it’s easy to get stuff.
"But it’s nowhere near done in terms of the impact on the operating model."
