Scale globally, get four nines availability with new Cloud Bigtable capabilities

We’re very happy to announce that global replication is now generally available to all Cloud Bigtable users, following last month’s beta launch. This global, multi-region replication allows users to replicate data across up to four clusters worldwide, in any region in which Cloud Bigtable is available.

Cloud Bigtable is a highly scalable, fully managed NoSQL database service for use cases from gigabytes to petabyte scale, where throughput, low-latency data access and reliability are critical. Replicated Cloud Bigtable instances can provide higher availability and resilience in the event of zonal failures. With this launch, we’ve also increased the SLA on availability for Cloud Bigtable instances to 99.99% with replication (using a multi-cluster routing policy) and 99.9% otherwise.

We’ve heard some great insights from initial adopters since the beta launch. One of the key advantages of global replication is that you can better serve a global audience—reducing latency when serving data to your customers, no matter where they are in the world. Spotify serves music lovers across the world and they were keen to take advantage of this expanded replication capability.

“Spotify is a global business with a global user base. Being able to provide a great audio experience to our users is a key priority for us,” said Niklas Gustavsson, chief architect at Spotify. “With Cloud Bigtable clusters in Asia, Europe, and the United States, we’re able to get low-latency data access all over the world, enabling Spotify to provide a seamless experience for our users. We’re also pleased with the continuous collaboration and deep engagement with Google’s product teams to accelerate both our businesses.”

How multi-region replication works

It’s super easy to get started. Add a cluster to your Cloud Bigtable instance at any time, and we’ll automatically replicate the data. Cloud Bigtable supports multi-primary replication, so every cluster accepts both reads and writes. Each cluster can also be scaled independently, allowing you to provision for exactly what you need in each zone or region.

During Next ’19, the Cloud Bigtable and Cloud Networking teams shared how Cloud Bigtable takes advantage of Google’s extensive global network to make multi-region replication possible. You can check out the session recording for more details.

Using Cloud Bigtable replication in production
Examples of workloads in financial services, advertising, and IoT show the wide variety of use cases that replication can help support.

Availability is critical for many of our users, especially those in regulated industries like financial services and healthcare. Cloud Bigtable replication provides resilience in the event of zonal or regional failures, and can play a critical role in your disaster recovery strategy.

Multi-region replication allows our AdTech users to locate their data close to their customers and to ad exchanges. This makes it easier to reduce end-to-end request latencies for ad bidding and personalization services, where custom advertisements and page content is served to website visitors in real time.

Finally, customers use replication to separate data ingest from analysis. Cloud Bigtable replication allows you to collect data from geographically dispersed sources and perform centralized analysis in a separate cluster, without impacting data collection. This strategy can be particularly helpful for IoT workflows, fraud detection, and personalization.

To get started with Cloud Bigtable replication, create an instance and configure one or more application profiles to use in your distributed application. Or, simply add a cluster to an existing instance and we’ll replicate your data automatically.

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