To help larger,data-intensive organisations manage their petabytes of data more effectively, Google has now announced Cloud BigTable, a NoSQL managed database powered at its core by Google’s BigTble technology.
As the name suggests, Google’s latest enterprise offering is powered by BigTable, a database tech explained by Google in an academic paper. Google’s BigTable database is behind a large chunk of its consumer offerings, which includes Gmail and Google Search as well.
Bigtable is a distributed storage system for managing structured data that is designed to scale to a very large size: petabytes of data across thousands of commodity servers. Many projects at Google store data in Bigtable, including web indexing, Google Earth, and Google Finance. These applications place very different demands on Bigtable, both in terms of data size (from URLs to web pages to satellite imagery) and latency requirements (from backend bulk processing to real-time data serving).
Cloud BigTable is a full managed offering from Google, with everything from setting up to final deployment being taken care of by Google engineers. Cloud Bigtable is accessed through the HBase API, and as a result, it is natively integrated with the existing big data and Hadoop ecosystems.
Google’s Cloud BigTable is company’s biggest and most serious bet in the rapidly growing public cloud market. And since most enterprises are aware of Google’s fascinating success called BigTable, the search giant has done a clever nomenclature of its cloud offering, banking on BigTable’s current reputation. Cloud Bigtable has been used by Google for 10+ years for its largest applications, including search, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Earth, YouTube, and many others.
While Amazon with its AWS Services is the current reigning champion, Microsoft too unveiled a slew of new, Azure-centered services to take on Amazon. Most notable of all of Microsoft announcements was Azure Data Lake, a hyper-scale repository for BigData workloads, and quite possibly the only serious contender against AWS till date.
Cloud Bigtable scales to hundreds of petabytes and millions of reads and writes per second while maintaining single-digit millisecond latencies.
As for current clients, Google has already roped in SunGuard to help it to provide deep analysis of financial-market data for traders, helping clients deal with the massive quantity of information generated in current-era’s automatic trading market.
