Google has made it easier for IT users and developers to run their Apache Cassandra database clusters on the Google Compute Engine under a new simplified deployment process.
The availability of the new service was unveiled by Brian Lynch, a Google solutions architect, in a July 14 post on the Google Cloud Platform Blog.
“If you saw our [March 2014] post about Cassandra hitting 1 million writes per second on Google Compute Engine, then you know we’re getting serious about open source NoSQL,” wrote Lynch. “Today, we’re making it even easier to launch a dedicated Apache Cassandra cluster on Google Compute Engine. All it takes is one click after some basic information such as the size of the cluster. In a matter of minutes, you get a complete Cassandra cluster deployed and configured.”
The new service provides automatic configuration for each node, including tuned writes for Google Persistent Disk and Java Virtual Machine tuning to perform on Google Compute Engine instances, wrote Lynch. “We’re making it easier to run the software you love at the scale you need with the reliability of Google Compute Platform,” he wrote.
Apache Cassandra is a scalable database that offers high availability and high fault tolerance on commodity hardware or cloud infrastructure, according to The Apache Foundation.
The “click-to-deploy” process for Cassandra on Google Compute Engine is meant to help developers get a development or test environment running quickly, according to the service’s FAQs. Detailed information is available about the click-to-deploy process from Google. The deployment of the Cassandra clusters is managed by Google Cloud Deployment Manager, which uses templates to help set up the configurations.
Google is often adding new services and tweaking its Google Cloud Platform for users and developers.
In June, Google began experimenting with a new method to drastically speed up the transfer of large datasets on the company’s cloud storage platform. The process, called Online Cloud Import for Google Cloud Storage, is now in limited preview mode for selected customers to use and test as the system is refined. Interested customers can sign up to participate in the limited preview.
In April 2014, Google announced the availability of its Google Cloud Platform services to the Asia Pacific region as it moves to expand the reach of its cloud services to more developers around the world. The new service availability means that the Google Cloud Platform Website and the developer console will also be available in Japanese and Traditional Chinese.
Also in April, the Google Cloud Platform expanded its capabilities with Hadoop through new Hadoop connectors that can be used with Google BigQuery and Google Cloud Datastore to run Hadoop queries. Also bolstering the cloud platform was a new version of Google App Engine, Version 1.9.3, which was also announced.
Earlier in April, Google unveiled new lower pricing for Google Cloud Platform users through “Sustained Use Discounts” that the company made available to users who run large projects on virtual machines. Under the new pricing scheme, users will save more as they use more virtual machines in the Google Cloud.