As part of Google Cloud Next event held this week in San Francisco, Google Inc. had the chance to show firsthand the enterprise benefits of open source collaboration. Its own Kubernetes offering has acted as an open source lure for developers managing containerized applications, hoping to prove Google’s out-of-the-box methods can support an easy switch from rival cloud offerings.

“It was all fresh and clean and new for me, so it was great to really taste the [Google] Kool-Aid and see how delicious it could be,” said Christopher Wahl (pictured), technical evangelist at Rubrik Inc.

Wahl recently joined Stu Miniman (@stu), co-host of theCUBE, from SiliconANGLE Media’s Palo Alto studio, during the Google Cloud Next event to discuss different aspects of the community event, as well as ideas for future improvements.

Learning is a two-way street

During the event, the participants broke into eight different groups that focused on different aspects in which users were interested, such as the topics of containers and abstraction layers.

“Everyone had a completely different idea and background about that. I felt like I was an alien in that conversation,” said Wahl. He went on to say he liked that, because it really gave him completely new views into some of the concepts they were discussing.

Wahl did say that an area where he believes Google can improve is in their communications with the developer community. In Wahl’s opinion, Google appears to say to the community, “We don’t want to tell you how to do things, how to build architecture in a certain way.” To the contrary, Wahl stressed that he is very much open to suggestions from Google from its lessons learned.

While Google is very good at providing examples, it seems to be more from an experimental than a practical side. Wahl said he would prefer reference architecture or example environments that use proven client strategies.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Google Cloud NEXT 2017. (*Disclosure: Some segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE are sponsored. Sponsors have no editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE