What Our Being a Google Cloud Platform Partner Means for Our Clients

Over a year after our founding, Fairwinds offered DevOps consulting exclusively on AWS. Then in March of 2016 we made a big pivot in the direction of Kubernetes. A few months after that pivot I ran into someone outside of work, and we got to talking. When asked what he did for a living, he said, “I can tell you, but it probably won’t mean anything to you.” I told him, “Hey, that’s what I tell people!”

It turns out he was the head of Google Cloud Partnerships in America, and he was thrilled to hear that we were doing Kubernetes work. He told me about the genesis of Kubernetes at Google, then talked about Google’s heavy investment in Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and asked if we’d be interested in becoming a partner. At first I was hesitant. We had been partners with AWS for quite some time, and they didn’t seem to know we exist. I figured there wouldn’t be any real value in a partnership.

I was wrong. It turns out Google is very invested in Kubernetes and is leaning heavily on their partners to help grow GCP. We became one of their first five service partners on Kubernetes.io, and since that time Google has asked us to speak on Kubernetes to their potential customers and members of their sales team at Google offices in three cities.

How Our Google Partnership Benefits Our Clients

Google partnership brings four major advantages to our clients:

1. Our clients have a high degree of trust that we’re good at what we do. They know we’re not just calling ourselves experts. They know we have the experience to back it up.
2. Our close relationship allows us to bring Google to the table when a client is considering a cloud migration. Reps from Google work hard to make sure they’re doing everything they can for our clients. Without fail, Google is ready – and eager – to help.
3. The Google folks are willing to find ways to share their roadmap for upcoming features. A prospective client may ask something like, “I’m running X on AWS, and I don’t think you have that on GCP, is that true?” Over and again, Google works carefully with our clients to share NDA-protected information which is key to the clients’ decision-making process.
4. Our partnership has allowed us to help smaller startups apply for cloud credits on GCP, and some have been awarded large amounts of credit. Google has even been willing to subsidize the cost of GCP until the cloud migration is complete (and production workloads are running on Google’s cloud) or even pay directly for the services Fairwinds provides in migrating a client to GCP.

Google Partnership Pays Off Big for Our Clients

We became GCP partners a little over a year ago, and we’re as excited as ever to be Google partners. If you’re looking at running Kubernetes-based infrastructure in the cloud, we can’t say enough good things about Google Container Engine (GKE).