Google Acquires AWS-Focused StackDriver

The latest Google (GOOG) acquisition is a clear shot across the bow at Amazon Web Services (AWS). The growing public cloud firm (which made its reputation for a little-known search engine) has been gearing up for a battle against AWS and Microsoft Azure (MSFT), as well as other infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) companies, and now it’s taking a direct shot at Amazon by acquiring one of its cloud monitoring partners.

Google has acquired StackDriver, which isn’t solely Amazon-focused but has built the majority of its business around monitoring and supporting AWS. Until now, that is. With the acquisition, its AWS cloud monitoring options are likely going to vanish—and rather quickly—only for its technology to end up in the growing Google repertoire of cloud services.

Not a lot of details were released in the Google blog by product manager Tom Kershaw, and the Google employee was short and to the point with the announcement.

“Stackdriver has built a leading service to help developers intelligently monitor the apps and services they’re building and running in the cloud,” Kershaw wrote. “This allows customers to have more visibility into errors, performance, behavior and operations. The teams are going to be working to integrate Stackdriver's great functionality so that Google Cloud Platform customers can take advantage of these new advanced monitoring capabilities.”

That was pretty much the entirety of the post.

Such a monitoring service could go over well with Google’s customers and partners. So many of the cloud monitoring services that have launched to date have focused on Amazon, even if they actually offer more options like Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. For Google, it’s another big step forward in trying to provide a solid cloud service with the quality checks customers are expecting.

Offering cloud monitoring natively could provide Google with a strong competitive advantage over some other IaaS providers. But StackDriver is far from the only cloud monitoring service provider out there; and it’s an advantage that will only hold up if Google continues to develop the application.