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Google’s cloud platform group this week announced general availability of Cloud Bigtable, a fully managed database service capable of handling petabyte- scale workloads.
The announcement was one of three from the Cloud Platform Group this week. Google this week also announced general availability of its Cloud Datastore managed NoSQL database service and talked up its existing and forthcoming support for applications built in Microsoft’s ASP.Net environment.
Cloud Bigtable is a technology that Google has used internally for several years. It powers many of Google’s most heavily used services, such as Gmail, Search, Maps and Analytics. It is designed to handle very large data sets at high speeds. According to Google, that makes it well-suited for analytical and operational applications, such as financial data analysis, internet of things and user analytics.
Google has previously described Bigtable as delivering more than double the performance of other NoSQL technologies, such as Cassandra and Hbase, while running faster and delivering a lower total cost of ownership.
Google built Bigtable to “handle use cases ranging from low latency real-time data serving to high-throughput web indexing and analytics,” Misha Brukman, product manager for Google Cloud Bigtable, wrote in a blog post announcing general availability of the technology.
Over the years, Bigtable has had a big impact on the NoSQL database ecosystem and inspired other scalable database technologies like Hbase and Cassandra, he said.
Google this week also announced general availability of a new API for customers of its Cloud Datastore NoSQL database service. The new v1 API for Cloud Datastore enables enterprises to access their Google Compute Engine database or their Google Container Engine database from a broader range of endpoints and computing environments.
In addition to enabling better cross-platform access to Datastore, Google this week also announced several resources that are available to companies to help them use the technology more effectively. One is a new, simplified method for calculating database size for pricing purposes. Another is a set of best practices for managing Datastore transactions and ensuring consistent querying of the database.
In addition to the product- and service-related announcements Google this week also touted its support for applications built on Microsoft’s ASP.NET.
In a blog post, Chris Sells, product manager of cloud developer tools at Google, pointed to several examples where he claimed the company has made it easier for enterprises to run ASP.NET applications on Google’s cloud.
For instance, Google supports the ability for organizations to create new Compute Engine virtual machines from a Windows Server Data Center base image, he said.
In addition, Google has released several new versions of SQL Server that will be available as base images on Google Compute Engine along with Windows Server, Sells said.
“With Windows Server, ASP.NET and SQL Server, you’ve got everything you need to bring your ASP.NET 4.x sites and services to Google Cloud Platform,” Sells noted. “We think you’re going to be happy that you did.”