New GCP database options to power your enterprise workloads
Penny Avril
Director of Product Management, Databases
Databases power critical applications and workloads for enterprises across every industry, and we want to make it easier for businesses to use and manage those databases. Our goal is to provide you the capabilities to run any workload, existing and future, on Google Cloud. That’s why we offer secure, reliable and highly available database services, and have been working to deeply integrate open-source partner services running on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to give you the freedom of choice when it comes to how to manage your data.
Today, we’re announcing a number of enhancements to our database portfolio:
- Cloud SQL for Microsoft SQL Server in alpha
- Federated queries from BigQuery to Cloud SQL
- Elastic Cloud on GCP now available in Japan and coming soon to Sydney
Open the window to the cloud with Cloud SQL for Microsoft SQL Server
When you move to the cloud, you shouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel. Our goal at GCP is to make it easy for everything you use on-premises to work as expected once you move to the cloud. Cloud SQL for Microsoft SQL Server (currently in alpha) lets you bring existing SQL Server workloads to GCP and run them in a fully managed database service.
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.
Federated queries from BigQuery to Cloud SQL
Data can only create value for your business when you put it to work, and businesses need secure and easy-to-use methods to explore and manage data that is stored in multiple locations. To help, we’re continuing to expand federated queries to more GCP products so you can bring analysis to data, wherever it is and right within BigQuery. We currently support querying non-BigQuery native storage systems like Cloud Storage, Cloud Bigtable and Sheets, and today we’re extending the federated query capability to include Cloud SQL. 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 on GCP available in Japan; Sydney coming soon
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.
We’re pleased to announce the expanded availability of Elastic Cloud in Google Cloud’s Japan region, with Sydney region availability coming soon. As the creators of the Elastic Stack, built on Elasticsearch, Elastic builds self-managed and SaaS offerings that make data usable in real time and at scale for search use cases, like logging, security, and analytics. With more integration to come, you will soon be able to use your GCP commits toward Elastic Cloud, with a single bill from Google Cloud.
How customers are using GCP databases
We’ve heard from customers here in Japan that they’ve found new flexibility and scale with GCP databases, along with strong consistency and less operational overhead.
Merpay is a provider of secure online payment technology. Merpay’s Mercari platform has about 13 million monthly active users and depends on the performance and scalability of GCP database technology to run smoothly. “We adopted Cloud Spanner with little experience in order to store the data of a new smartphone payment service, to keep consistent with our culture of ‘Go Bold,’ where we encourage employees to take on challenges,”says Keisuke Sogawa, CTO of Merpay, Inc. “Additionally, adopting a microservices architecture based on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) made it possible for teams to freely and quickly develop services and maintain their service levels even as the organization grew larger. As a result, we released the Merpay service within a short span of 15 months, and today our provision of the service remains reliable for our customers.”
Learn more about GCP databases, and get details about Forrester naming Google Cloud a Leader in The Forrester Wave Database-as-a-Service and The Forrester Wave Big Data NoSQL.
Check out these Tokyo Cloud Next ’19 sessions for more about GCP databases:
