Go global with Cloud Bigtable

Today, we're announcing the expansion of Cloud Bigtable's replication capabilities, giving you the flexibility to make your data available across a region or worldwide. Now in beta, this enhancement allows customers to create a replicated cluster in any zone at any time.

Cloud Bigtable is a fast, globally distributed wide-column NoSQL database service. It can seamlessly scale from gigabytes to petabytes, while maintaining high-performance throughput and low-latency response times to meet your application's goals. This is the same functionality that is proven in a number of Google products, including Google Search, Google Maps, and YouTube, as well as used by Google Cloud customers in industries and workloads including Internet of Things (IoT), finance, ad tech, gaming, and more, to deliver personalization and analytics features to users worldwide. Apps using Cloud Bigtable can serve data quickly to users, and can now do that even when the data has been created thousands of miles away.

Cloud Bigtable now makes it easy to globally distribute data, so you can:

• Serve global audiences with lower latency by bringing data that’s generated in any region, such as personalized recommendations, closer to the users wherever they are
• Aggregate data ingested from worldwide sources (such as IoT sensor data) to a single location for aggregation, analytics, and machine learning
• Increase the availability and durability of your data beyond the scope of a single region
• Isolate batch and serving workloads

Every cluster in a replicated instance accepts both reads and writes, providing multi-primary replication with eventual consistency. You can set up replication by adding one or more Cloud Bigtable clusters, whether on the same continent or halfway around the world.

In the example below, let’s say you have customers in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. With this new enhancement, you can deploy a globally replicated Cloud Bigtable instance with a cluster in each region to provide low-latency access to your end users.

Cloud Bigtable customer Oden Technologies was keen to boost the availability and durability of their service for their worldwide industrial automation customers.

“Google Cloud Bigtable is an essential component of Oden Technologies' real-time analytics,” says James Maidment, Director of Infrastructure. “Our analytics enable our customers in manufacturing to eliminate waste and quality defects in their production process. In order for Oden to be a truly mission-critical tool and competitive with existing solutions, our customers need to trust that our service will be online when they need it most. The Cloud Bigtable multi-region replication allows us to guarantee and deliver the availability and durability our customers expect from Oden.”

You can configure a replication topology using any zones where Cloud Bigtable is available, or add clusters in additional regions to an existing instance without any downtime. Additionally, the flexible replication model provided by Cloud Bigtable lets you reconfigure your instance's replication topology at any time by allowing you to add or remove clusters for any existing instance, even if you are currently writing data to that instance.

Here's what happens when you add a cluster to an existing instance:

• First, all existing data will be bulk-replicated from the existing cluster to the new one
• Then, all future writes to any cluster will be replicated to all other clusters in the instance

All tables within an instance are replicated to all clusters, and you can monitor replication progress for each table via the Tables list in the GCP Console.

Moving data between regions in Cloud Bigtable

To move data from one region to another, just add a new cluster in the desired location, and then remove the old cluster. The old cluster remains available until data has been replicated to the new cluster, so you don't have to worry about losing any writes. You can continue writing to Cloud Bigtable, since it takes care of replicating data automatically.

Cloud Bigtable in more GCP regions

We are also happy to announce the latest regional launch of Cloud Bigtable in São Paulo, Brazil, as we continue to deploy Cloud Bigtable in more locations to bring the performance and reliability of the popular wide-column database service to more customers.

Additionally, we've recently added Cloud Bigtable in Mumbai, India; Hong Kong; and Sydney, Australia, making Cloud Bigtable available in 17 total regions. Here are all the current Cloud Bigtable regions, with more coming in the near future:

Google's global network powers Cloud Bigtable

Cloud Bigtable's high-performance global replication is enabled by Google's global private network, which spans the globe and provides high-throughput, low-latency connections around the world to support large-scale database workloads.

Next steps

If you're interested in learning more about Google's global network and how it enables replication across regions and continents in Cloud Bigtable, be sure to sign up for the session at Google Cloud NEXT in San Francisco in April. We look forward to seeing you there.

To get started with Cloud Bigtable replication, create an instance and configure one or more application profiles to use in your distributed application, or try it out with a Cloud Bigtable lab. Use code 1j-bigtable-719 to explore the Qwiklab at no cost through March 31, 2019.