Google is making available to customers Cloud Bigtable, their own database used for more than a decade for services such as Search, GMail, Maps or YouTube. While they are not open sourcing Bigtable as they did with other products, the new cloud service is accessible through an open source interface, the Apache HBase 1.0.1 API.
Cloud Bigtable comes with the following features:
- Scalable to hundreds of petabytes
- High availability
- Replicated
- Data is encrypted during transfer and while resting
- Fully managed
- Integrated with the Hadoop ecosystem
- Recommended for financial, IoT, time-series and marketing data
Google claims Bigtable provides “unmatched performance” with “single-digit millisecond latency and over 2X the performance per dollar of unmanaged NoSQL alternatives,” as shown by the following chart published by Google and not yet verified by an independent benchmark:
There are some limitations in using the HBase API, described in detail here. Cloud Bigtable is currently in beta.
Other resources: Pricing, Cloud Bigtable Documentation, Stack Overflow Q&A Forum, Whitepaper - Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data (PDF).