Artificial intelligence and machine learning have become powerful tools for tech giants looking to build the optimal cloud service platform. To catch up with rivals Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, Google is accelerating the development of its own cloud services. At the annual Google Cloud Next conference yesterday in San Francisco the company unveiled a handful of new AI-based services and partnerships for its smart analytics and machine learning tools.

This is the first Google Cloud Next conference for new Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian. A veteran who was previously Oracle’s president of product development, Kurian told The Wall Street Journal his plan is to borrow strategies from Oracle and expand Google Cloud’s sales team to help the company take the lead in the cloud competition.

New Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian

Anthos — The hybrid cloud management product based on Kubernetes

In his keynote speech Kurian introduced Anthos, a hybrid cloud management product based on Kubernetes that allows customers to run managed container services on multiple cloud or hybrid cloud deployments. Customers can move old applications and run them on Google’s cloud without modifying the original code. In her speech, Google Cloud Director of Product Management Jennifer Lin said “With Anthos, you can run anywhere.”

Google Cloud Director of Product Management Jennifer Lin at Google Cloud Next

Lin also revealed a beta service called Anthos Migrate — a technology that can auto-migrate and modernize customers’ infrastructures to original virtual machines or applications. Her demo showed how Anthos Migrate can simplify modernization and move virtual machines operating either on-premises or on cloud providers such as AWS and Azure into containers on the Google Kubernete Engine. Anthos Migrate will be available in beta soon.

Google partners with seven open-source companies

Under Kurian’s leadership, Google Cloud took an aggressive step to challenge leading cloud vendor Amazon Web Services by announcing partnerships with seven open-source, software-centric companies — Confluent, DataStax, Elastic, InfluxData, MongoDB, Neo4j, and Redis Labs.

Earlier this year, shares of Elastic and MongoDB fell after AWS introduced a free Elasticsearch code library and MonogBD-like database software. Google provided some relief yesterday, pledging to provide fully managed services based on Elastic, MongoDB, and its other five new partners’ flagship softwares and databases, which will be seamlessly integrated with the Google Cloud Platform.

In a Redis Labs press announcement, Google Cloud Corporate Vice President Kevin Ichhpurani said “We share Redis Labs’ vision and commitment to open source-centric innovation and we’re excited to deepen our partnership on behalf of customers. Bringing Redis Enterprise to GCP is beneficial to customers looking for a seamless, fully managed, cloud native service that they can rely on for their critical workloads.”

New data centres in Seoul and Salt Lake City

Google Cloud also announced it is building data centres in Seoul, South Korea, and Salt Lake City, Utah, expanding its cloud computing infrastructure to 13 countries across 19 different time zones. Google Cloud’s new data centre in Osaka, Japan, will come online in the next few weeks, while another in Jakarta, Indonesia, will be put into use in early 2020.

Google Cloud Next 2019 runs to April 11 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.