In a recent blog post, Google announced enhancements to their existing Google Cloud Platform (GCP) database investments, including Cloud SQL for Microsoft SQL Server in alpha, Federated queries from BigQuery to Cloud SQL and Elastic Cloud on GCP being available in Japan and soon to be released in Sydney, Australia.
Cloud SQL for Microsoft SQL Server is an offering that entices existing Microsoft SQL Server customers to move their workloads to Google’s cloud and have them run in a fully managed service. Penny Avril, director of product management, describes some of the benefits that customers are realizing:
We’ve heard great feedback from our early access customers using Cloud SQL for SQL Server. For enterprises, this option means they can now experience fully managed SQL Server with built-in high availability and backup capability. You can lift and shift SQL Server workloads without changing apps, then use the data from these apps with other GCP services like BigQuery and AI tools to create more intelligent applications.
BigQuery allows for external systems to be queried, without the need to load data from those external systems into BigQuery. The capability is enabled through a feature called Federated queries. Currently, there is Federated query support for Cloud Bigtable, Cloud Storage and Google Drive. As part of this announcement, Google has added Federated query support for Cloud SQL. Avril explains the driver for including this support as:
This is just part of our continuing efforts to integrate our services across products to provide a seamless customer experience and build strong ecosystems around our products.
Elastic Cloud is a SaaS offering provided by Elastic that allows organizations to deploy, operate and scale analytical search applications. These applications have applicability in the areas of logging, security and analytics. Google has also announced expanded availability of Elastic Cloud in the Japan region and is expecting support for the Sydney region in the near future. In addition, Google will soon allow customers to use their Google commit to pay for these partner services so that they do not have to manage multiple bills.
Even though Google is continuing to expand on its own analytics and database technologies in their cloud, they are focused on building a broader open-source ecosystem that includes partners. Avril explains why this is important:
Migrating to the cloud can be challenging. That’s something we keep in mind as we develop our database products and integrate them with the rest of GCP. We do this with GCP-built services like Cloud SQL and Cloud Spanner, as well as through deeply integrated partner services running on GCP. These open source-centric strategic partners are in line with our belief that open source is a critical component of the public cloud.
Customers adopting GCP databases have experienced success. One of these customers is Merpay, who is a provider of secure online payment technology. Today, Merpay uses GCP database technology to support 13 million active monthly users and require the databases to consistently perform to address the scalability requirements of the solution.
