On Wednesday, Google announced Google Cloud Bigtable, a NoSQL database that can be accessed via the Apache HBase API. Powered by Bigtable, the database that powers Google applications such as Google Search and Gmail, Google Cloud Bigtable delivers a highly scalable database that specializes in ingesting and performing analytics on massive datasets. Google Cloud Bigtable delivers latency on the order of single-digit milliseconds and twofold performance benefits in comparison to other “unmanaged NoSQL alternatives.” In a blog post, Google Product Manager Cory O’Connor revealed performance advantages of Google Cloud BigTable over Hbase and Cassandra with respect to both write throughput per dollar and read/write latency, in milliseconds. As a fully managed service, customers need not take responsibility for Google Cloud Bigtable’s infrastructure but can instead focus on populating Google Cloud Bigtable with data and subsequently refining the analytic insights needed to more effectively run business operations. The product integrates with Hadoop and subsequently supports the ingestion of big data in a variety of formats.
Because the platform’s underlying architecture has been used to power prominent Google applications for years, customers can reasonably expect Google Cloud Bigtable to deliver on its promises of low latency, high performance and scalability. The product targets organizations with massive data ingestion needs and embraces use cases related to the internet of things as well as verticals such as financial services that handle massive volumes of data, daily. By releasing Google Cloud Bigtable, Google renders the same technology used to underpin much of its commercial operations more broadly accessible and in so doing, draws a parallel to Amazon’s release of Amazon Machine Learning, a product that is similarly derived from the very technology used to run Amazon’s own internal business operations. Google’s decision to democratize the core technology of its BigTable application symptomatically illustrates a broader trend in enterprise IT whereby technology behemoths such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have the capability to monetize curated versions of products they have used to run their own business operations for years and thereby make available, to everyday enterprises, battle-tested technology that can be used for data ingestion, analytics and visualization.
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