All of Google’s cloud database services are now out of beta

Google is making a number of announcements around its Cloud Platform today. Most of these focus on its various cloud database services, but the company is also making a major update to its low-cost Nearline cloud storage service for cold data, making its disk volumes faster, and allowing its users to bring their own encryption keys to Cloud Storage.

The overall message Google is clearly trying to send here is that its cloud computing services are ready for production use.

On the database side, the big news is that all of Google’s cloud database services are now out of beta. That means the company’s second generation version of Cloud SQL, which allows you to easily run and manage MySQL databases in the cloud, is now generally available after about nine months in beta.

Cloud Bigtable, another NoSQL database, but with a focus on very large analytics and operational workloads, is now also generally available.

Also out of beta is the API forGoogle Cloud Datastore, Google’s NoSQL database for web and mobile app workloads. Cloud Datastore itself was already generally available for a while, but developers were only able to use it as part of Google App Engine. With the API, developers can use it for applications outside of App Engine as well. The company says Cloud Datastore, which is used by the likes of Snapchat, currently handles one trillion requests per month.

Google notes that it had added various features to these services over the course of their betas, but what will likely matter even more to its users is that these services are now backed by an SLA (for Cloud Datastore, that’s 99.95% monthly uptime, for example).

For those who want to use Microsoft’s flagship database server in the Google Cloud, the company now also offers SQL Server images with built-in licenses (currently in beta) and the ability to bring existing licenses to its platform. Running SQL Server images incurs some extra cost on top of Google’s normal instance costs, though. That’s $0.1645 per core/hour for SQL Server Standard and $0.011 per core/hour for SQL Server Web. Using SQL Server Express, though, is free.

While Microsoft may have an edge when it comes to running SQL Server in the cloud, Google knows that it needs to offer its enterprise users the option to bring their existing applications and workloads to its cloud if it wants to wean them off Microsoft’s cloud services (which, for the time being, remain significantly more popular than Google’s among enterprise customers).

As for storage, Google today announced that its low-cost Nearline storage service for “cold” data is getting much faster. Nearline competes directly with Amazon’s Glacier storage and like that service, it provides lower availability guarantees in return for significantly lower storage cost. Until now, Nearline users also had to contend with a 3 to 5 second latency when accessing data. That latency is now gone. As a Google spokesperson told me, access is now “almost real-time.”

Google’s Persistent Disk volumes are now also faster, with maximum read and write IOPS going from 15,000 to 25,000. That’s useful for both database applications and storing other types of data locally as well.

“Today marks a major milestone in our tremendous momentum and commitment to making Google Cloud Platform the best public cloud for your enterprise database workloads,” the Google team writes today. It’s not like we needed more evidence that Google is taking its Cloud Platform very seriously these days, but if you needed more evidence, now you have it.

FEATURED IMAGE: GOOGLE/GOOGLE

SOURCES: TECHCRUNCH

Microsoft Moving Skype To Azure, Ditching P2P

The Redmond giant is wrapping up the final stages of migrating its Skype VoIP service to the cloud from its peer-to-peer backbone. The move will allow the company to offer new services including mobile group video calling and Skype Bots.

Microsoft is nearing the completion of its Skype migration to the cloud from its peer-to-peer backbone, a move the company says will allow it to offer a number of new services and improve the performance of some of its older features.

Microsoft, which acquired Skype in 2011, has recently been focusing on migrating its VoIP service to a mobile-friendly cloud architecture, according to a blog post from Gurdeep Pall, a Microsoft vice president who oversees Skype.

"By moving to the cloud we have been able to significantly improve existing features like file sharing and video messaging, and launch new features like mobile group video calling, Skype Translator and Skype Bots to name just a few," Pall said in a statement.

Although Pall's blog did not mention Microsoft's cloud platform specifically, he told ZDNet that most Skype consumers will be migrated to Azure in the near future.

(Image: svariophot/iStockphoto)

Microsoft says it expects to complete its Skype transition in the coming months and notes support for some devices and operating systems will cease after Oct. 2016, according to its Skype support page.

For example, support for Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard will be discontinued, but users can still access the service via Skype for Web directly from a browser. However, Microsoft notes, support for Yosemite on the Mac, iOS 8, Android 4.03, and Windows 7, 8, XP, and Vista will continue, and that users should update Skype when prompted by the service.

"Our focus will be on the newly released lighter, faster and more responsive UWP app for Windows 10, Skype for iPhone, iPad and Android as well as a web-based native version of Skype for other supported platforms like previous Windows operating Systems, Mac and Linux, which will benefit from the latest ORTC or WebRTC technology that we've been working on for the last year," Pall said.

He added that during the transition, Skype users may find the service encounters such hiccups as messages that do not sync across user's devices, or delayed notifications.

[See 9 Skype Alternatives Worth Considering.]

These bumps have been noted over the past couple of years as Microsoft started to pull away from P2P. As far back as 2012, the Redmond giant had started to push some of Skype's infrastructure to its data centers, according to a ZDNet report.

The following year, Microsoft had touted that 50 billion Skype-to-Skype call minutes had passed through its Azure cloud, according to ZDNet. Only been more recently has this migration to the cloud has taken on the flavor of a mobile-friendly cloud.

"Skype's transition to the cloud is a huge technical endeavor, but one that is necessary and one we firmly believe in," Pall said. "Our users are at the core of everything we do and this transition will enable us to meet their needs in the years to come."

Dawn Kawamoto is a freelance writer and editor. She is an award-winning journalist who has written and edited technology, management, leadership, career, finance, and innovation stories for such publications as CNET's News.com, TheStreet.com, AOL's DailyFinance, and The ... View Full Bio

SOURCES: INFORMATIONWEEK