Sharing is Caring: The Value of Open Source

Some innovations are too important not to share. Not only that: the most innovative solutions often result from collaborations and by integrating multiple views. For that reason, Google believes open source benefits all. While individual organizations can achieve a lot by themselves, being openly and freely available enables the development of innovative technology. Open source is a giant leap to solving real-world problems.

A recent article from Boston Consulting Group states that the benefit of Open Source Software (OSS) is that both internal developers and the external community develop code for it. OSS allows users to customize, maintain, and adapt to each project’s requirements. And all without the need to wait for a third party to provide a solution: there's source code out there, ready to be used.

At Google, we’ve always used open source to innovate. Because we enjoy being a part of the community, we want to give something back. To push the industry forward, we often release code or share the best practices we developed. At Google Open Source, we share projects that we have made available. Things like Chromium, the foundation of web browsers such as Microsoft Edge, Opera, and our Google Chrome - forming over 77% market share and leading to secondary innovations.

Several businesses recognize the need for brainpower and open-source their frameworks to help the entire field move faster. This especially holds true for Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IoT) projects which rely on enormous amounts of complex code. Buytaert, creator of Drupal and CTO and co-founder of Acquia puts it: “If we want IoT, AI and automation to progress at the rate we need them to, open source will be the only answer.” That brings us to TensorFlow, our end-to-end open source platform for machine learning. TensorFlow is being widely used by researchers and in the industry, pushing the state-of-the-art in machine learning. For example, read this case study to learn more about how Twitter ranked their tweets using TensorFlow.

In 2018, Carrefour Spain overhauled its aging IT infrastructure and built a technological foundation designed to provide its customers with improved service. But going through such a transformation is easier said than done for a company as big as Carrefour Spain, with over 700 stores spread across the country. The solution had to be powerful enough to handle large data processing tasks and had to scale rapidly during peak shopping times such as the holidays or Black Friday.

While transforming its data processing, Carrefour Spain also had its eye on boosting its e-commerce infrastructure ahead of the holiday season. Just a month before Black Friday, the company began migrating its e-commerce solution to Google Kubernetes Engine clusters. Kubernetes is the open-source container technology built upon 15 years of experience of running production workloads at Google and has been combined with best-of-breed ideas and practices from the community. With the help of the open source community, Kubernetes has achieved a staggering 86% adoption rate. Using Kubernetes, Carrefour Spain no longer needs to worry about provisioning new servers when the demand arises.

When Black Friday came, the new e-commerce platform built on Google Cloud passed the test with flying colors to scale up and down automatically without compromising performance.

“With Google Kubernetes Engine on Google Cloud, we can deploy and deliver new environments very quickly,” says Esther Vázquez Hevia, Director of Digital Transformation and Production and CISO at Carrefour Spain. “We can grow and resize our environments at the same speed that we roll out our projects.”

Watch the video below to see how Carrefour relies on Google Cloud technologies to deliver innovation that revolutionizes the food industry.