Google Cloud expands its bet on managed database services

Published April 25, 2018

Google announced a number of updates to its cloud-based database services today. For the most part, we’re not talking about any groundbreaking new products here, but all of these updates address specific pain points that enterprises suffer when they move to the cloud.

As Google Director of Product Management Dominic Preuss told me ahead of today’s announcements, Google long saw itself as a thought leader in the database space. For the longest time, though, that thought leadership was all about things like the Bigtable paper and didn’t really manifest itself in the form of products. Projects like the globally distributed Cloud Spanner database are now allowing Google Cloud to put its stamp on this market.

Preuss also noted that many of Google’s enterprise users often start with lifting and shifting their existing workloads to the cloud. Once they have done that, though, they are also looking to launch new applications in the cloud — and at that point, they typically want managed services that free them from having to do the grunt work of managing their own infrastructure.

Today’s announcements mostly fit into this mold of offering enterprises the kind of managed database services they are asking for.

The first of these is the beta launch of Cloud Memorystore for Redis, a fully managed in-memory data store for users who need in-memory caching for capacity buffering and similar use cases.

Google is also launching a new feature for Cloud Bigtable, the company’s NoSQL database service for big data workloads. Bigtable now features regional replication (or at least it will, once this has rolled out to all users within the next week or so). The general idea here is to give enterprises that previously used Cassandra for their on-premises workloads an alternative in the Google Cloud portfolio, and these cross-zone replications increase the availability and durability of the data they store in the service.

With this update, Google is also making Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL generally available with a 99.95 percent SLA, and it’s adding commit timestamps to Cloud Spanner.

What’s next for Google’s database portfolio? Unsurprisingly, Preuss wouldn’t say, but he did note that the company wants to help enterprises move as many of their workloads to the cloud as they can — and for the most part, that means managed services.