"Elastic sure looks to have collaborated with GCP" AFAICT that partnership just resulted in Elastic Cloud running on GCP in addition to AWS. If I had to guess,

"Elastic sure looks to have collaborated with GCP" AFAICT that partnership just resulted in Elastic Cloud running on GCP in addition to AWS. If I had to guess, I'd say that Elastic didn't think it was worth their time to support GCP, but Google provided some resources to encourage them to add it as an option. That way Google gets to tell prospective GCP customers that they have an option for hosted Elasticsearch without having to build it themselves.