Google introduces nosql database Cloud Bigtable

As of today, Google is launching a new service based on its Bigtable database software called Cloud Bigtable. The Cloud Bigtable service can be accessed via the open source Apache HBase API.

The company announced the new service on Wednesday on its cloud service blog. Bigtable already serves Google’s Search, Gmail and Analytics, among others, and the scalable nosql database service is now also available to other companies via the Google Cloud Platform.

With Cloud Bigtable, Google is targeting large organizations looking for scalable compute power for data-intensive applications and who want to focus on working on applications rather than maintaining and building a database infrastructure. In addition to existing applications, the system must also become an engine for the increasingly mature Internet of Things.

The system automatically scales with the user’s requirements. The system’s latency is below 10ms, the company writes on its blog. The system is accessible via, among other things, Apache’s HBase API, which makes integration with existing big data solutions such as Hadoop possible. All data is automatically replicated and stored encrypted.

A Google employee told Techcrunch that Cloud Datastore also uses a service based on Bigtable within the App Engine platform, but that this service mainly focuses on many reads from web applications and mobile apps. Cloud Bigtable is designed for large companies and institutions that need to process a lot of data and where the tasks are more complex, for example an organization that needs to stream and analyze data from a single large database.

The new service is available in beta, which means there is no official technical support yet.