Databases that transform businesses—What happened at Google Cloud Next ‘20: OnAir

Week 6 of Google Cloud Next ‘20: OnAir was all about Google Cloud databases and how to choose and use them, no matter where you are in your cloud journey. There was plenty to explore, from deep-dive sessions and demos to feature launches and customer stories. Across it all, what stood out is the strong momentum and adoption across Google Cloud databases for developers and enterprises alike.

Google Cloud’s range of databases are designed to help you tackle the unpredictable. Your databases shouldn’t get in the way of innovation and growth, but many legacy, on-prem databases are holding businesses back. We build our databases to meet you at any stage, whether it’s an as-is migration or a brand-new app developed in the cloud.  

Key data management announcements this week

This week, we launched new features aimed at solving the hardest data problems to help our customers run the most mission-critical applications. We kicked off the week with a keynote from Director of Product Management Penny Avril, who talked with social media platform ShareChat about how they met a 500% increase in demand using Cloud Spanner without changing a line of code. 

We also announced updates to our databases. For Spanner, the Spanner Emulator lets app developers do correctness testing when developing an app. A new C++ client library and increased SQL feature set also add more flexibility. In addition, cloud-native Spanner now offers new multi-region configurations for Asia and Europe with 99.999% availability. NoSQL database service Cloud Bigtable now offers more capabilities, like managed backups for high business continuity and added data protection. And expanded support and SLA for single-node production instances makes it even easier to use Bigtable for all use cases, both large and small. Mobile and web developers use Cloud Firestore to build apps easily, and it now offers a richer query language, C++ client library, and Firestore Unity SDK to make it easy for game developers to adopt Firestore. We are also introducing tools to give you better visibility into usage patterns and performance with Firestore Key Visualizer, which will be coming soon.

Cloud SQL, the fully managed service for MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQL Server, now offers more maintenance controls, cross-region replication, and committed use discounts, providing reliability and flexibility as you migrate to the cloud. For those users running specialized workloads like Oracle, Google Cloud's Bare Metal Solution enables you to move these workloads within milliseconds of latency to Google Cloud. Our Bare Metal Solution is now available in even more regions and provides a fast track to cloud while lowering overall costs. 

How customers are building and growing with cloud databases

We also heard from customers across industries on how they use Google Cloud databases to transform their business, especially in the face of the unpredictable. From The New York Times building a real-time collaborative editor to help publish faster and Khan Academy on how they met the rising demand for online learning to gaming publishers like Colopl supporting massive scale and variable usage through Spanner and ShareChat migrating from Amazon DynamoDB to Spanner for better scale and efficiency at 30% lower costs, it’s exciting to see what they’ve been able to accomplish. 

Check out data management demos

For data management week, we debuted new interactive demos that let you explore database decisions for yourself. If you’re trying to understand where to start, check out this demo that can help you choose which database is right for you. To see how Cloud SQL lets you achieve high availability, explore this demo. Or learn how you can get a consistent, real-time view of your inventory at scale across channels and regions using Spanner. And take a close look at how Bare Metal Solutions can help you run specialized workloads in the cloud.

Go deep with databases

Across our entire database portfolio, there are sessions to help you better understand each service and what’s new. For SQL Server, MySQL, or Postgres users, check out Getting to Know Cloud SQL for SQL Server or High Availability and Disaster Recovery with Cloud SQL. 

If it’s cloud-native you’re interested in, sessions like Modernizing HBase Workloads with Cloud Bigtable, Future-proof Your Business for Global Scale and Consistency with Cloud Spanner, or Simplify Complex Application Development Using Cloud Firestore provide deep dives to help you get started.

Looking ahead: Application modernization

Stay tuned to Next OnAir—next week is all about application modernization. Check out Tuesday’s keynote to learn more about Anthos and how it can help make the most of your on-premises investments and cloud offerings. 

Of course, we'll also bring you live technical talks and learning opportunities, aligned with each week's content. Click “Learn” on the Explore page to find each week's schedule. Haven’t yet registered for Google Cloud ’20 Next: OnAir? Get started at g.co/cloudnext.