Google has announced a cloud-based NoSQL database service capable of handling large amounts of data. Cloud Bigtable is a beta release, but uses technology already in use at Google.

Writing about the new beta on the Google Cloud Platform blog, Google’s Cory O’Connor described Cloud Bigtable as:

“a fully managed, high-performance, extremely scalable NoSQL database service accessible through the industry-standard, open-source Apache HBase API. Under the hood, this new service is powered by Bigtable, the same database that drives nearly all of Google’s largest applications.”

O’Connor also says that the product is mature, with Bigtable having driven Google’s most critical applications for more than ten years. The HBase API is also mature, of course.

The blog post says that Cloud Bigtable excels at large ingestion, analytics, and data-heavy serving workloads. The beta is being released for Google's central US region, Europe and Asia Pacific. Other regions will be added in the future.

The performance claims for Bigtable are impressive: single-digit millisecond latency even on hundreds of petabytes of data, and over twice the performance per dollar of unmanaged NoSQL alternatives: 

For developers, the open source interface is appealing. You access Bigtable through the HBase API, meaning that its already integrated with a lot of the existing big data and Hadoop ecosystem. You can also import and export data with existing HBase clusters through simple bulk ingestion tools using industry-standard formats.

All data is encrypted both in transit and at rest, and Bigtable is built with a replicated storage strategy. The claim is you can create a Cloud Bigtable cluster in less than ten seconds using a simple user interface, and once in Cloud Bigtable the backing storage scales automatically, so you don’t need to worry about getting the capacity requirements perfect first time.

The pricing for Cloud Bigtable starts at $0.65 per node per hour, and you have a minimum of three nodes per cluster. Storage costs $0.17 per gigabyte per month.

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