I talked to various developers from a few retail stores a few years ago and they said their companies are absolutely terrified of Amazon. Developers would be happy to use AWS but they are not allowed because it would be giving business to Amazon.

But when there is fear, there is opportunity. So Google is using that opportunity here. Not a bad move. Walmart is on-board as well it seems.

Saw news about Microsoft partnering with Amazon recently for some machine learning API. But wouldn't Microsoft compete with Amazon too? Though wonder if they are more worried about Google, "enemy of my biggest enemy is my friend" kind of thing.