Why I joined groundcover
Hear from groundcover’s Google Cloud Partner Manager Alex Turner as he describes why he joined groundcover and the milestones already achieved with the partnership.
Growing up in the Bay Area, my neighborhood was full of tinkerers, roboticists, and funky Stanford professors. Cool people doing cool, "different" things to help others. When I first met the team at groundcover, that exact same energy struck me: an open-minded, curiosity-driven culture with a pure passion for building. I could tell right away this was something special.
What really hooked me was the potential of our Google Cloud partnership. I’ve spent enough time in the cloud ecosystem to know that the best partnerships create genuine value for everyone involved: solving real problems for customers, driving growth for the partner, and giving cloud teams a compelling solution to bring into every account. That’s exactly what I see here.
By deploying directly inside a customer’s own cloud tenancy, a true Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) architecture, groundcover lets engineering teams run their observability data plane directly in Google Cloud. They get the slick, modern observability experience they expect without having to ship massive telemetry volumes out to a third-party vendor.
Observability is a massive workload. Logs, metrics, traces, Kubernetes telemetry, and now AI agent activity generate an incredible amount of data and infrastructure demand. As those volumes explode, groundcover keeps that workload inside GCP. That transforms the conversation from simply "swapping out a monitoring tool" to expanding what teams can achieve on Google Cloud.
AI makes that opportunity even bigger. We’re moving fast into an agentic era where applications, infrastructure, and AI agents produce more telemetry than ever. Engineering teams need that context accessible for both humans and agents, but traditional ingest pricing makes collecting everything absurdly expensive. groundcover changes the math: teams can collect high-fidelity production data inside their own environment without having to ration what’s worth keeping.
Beyond the tech, the team made joining an easy decision. The talent across groundcover is exceptional. Having worked with John Broad (VP of Partnerships) during my time at Google Cloud, reconnecting with him was effortless. Then having the opportunity to join forces with Shahar Azulay (CEO), Chris Churilo (VP of Marketing), Paul Trebe (VP of Sales), and the rest of the crew made this an easy "yes."
Building out our Google Cloud partnership from strategy to execution, collaborating with an all-star team, and solving a critical problem for the future of AI infrastructure? Yes please…it doesn't get better than this.
We’re already hitting major milestones, like our integration with GKE Autopilot, which solves the long-standing headache of getting deep, eBPF-based observability on fully managed Kubernetes clusters without giving up data control or racking up insane bills. It's exactly this kind of seamless GCP integration that gets me hyped for what’s ahead.
Want to see it in action? Join our upcoming joint webinar with Google Cloud! We’ll be breaking down how to scale telemetry for the AI era without losing your mind (or your budget).
I'm thrilled to be here, and we're just getting started.
