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

Google buys cloud platform

Google buys Orbitera, a platform for cloud marketplaces, for $100M+

Google today announced another acquisition that will help the company improve how it competes against Amazon’s AWS, Salesforce and Microsoft in the area of enterprise services, and specifically selling enterprise services in the cloud: it has acquired Orbitera, a startup that developed a platform for buying and selling cloud-based software.

Terms of the deal have not been disclosed but our sources close to the deal tell us it’s just north of $100 million.

This is an acquisition of talent, technology, and existing business. The CEO Marcin Kurc (tellingly) is an alum of AWS. And Google notes that some 60,000 enterprise stacks have already been launched on Orbitera. These include the likes of Adobe, Oracle and Metalogix, who all resell cloud services from third-party vendors as part of their larger enterprise businesses.

“This acquisition will not only improve support of software vendors on Google Cloud Platform but also provides customers with more choice and flexibility in today’s multi-cloud world,” Google said in a statement provided to TechCrunch.

Kurc notes in his announcement that Google will keep everything running as is, “at this time.”

The startup says its focus is on providing four (end-to-end) aspects of building cloud marketplaces: Packaging and Provisioning, Billing and Cost Optimization, Marketplace and Catalogs, Trials and Lead Management.

It looks like Google will continue to operate that business on behalf of existing users, and maybe to help out its own marketplace for cloud services on its own cloud platform.

“Looking to the future, we’re committed to maintaining Orbitera’s neutrality as a platform supporting multi-cloud commerce. We look forward to helping the modern enterprise thrive in a multi-cloud world,” writes Nan Boden, head of global technology partners at Google.

As Google has grown well beyond its earliest roots as a search company, its reached an interesting relationship with companies that are at turns friends and rivals to its own business interests.

Buying a platform company that works with so many of these in the area of cloud services is an interesting development for Google, and one that it’s keen to try to tread carefully in making.

In this case, Google is trying to reassure customers that even as it sells a platform to sell products, it recognises that the ultimate repository of those products might not be Google itself.

(Whether or not that is the case longer term is another question — in other areas like ads, Google has walked an impartial line and then changed course — but for now there is a viable enough business for Google in remaining a neutral party.)

“We recognize that both enterprise customers and ISVs want to be able to use more than one cloud provider and have a way to conduct product trials and proofs of concept before building a full production deployment, all using their trusted SIs (System Integrators), resellers and normal sales cycles,” Boden notes.

“Orbitera has built a strong ecosystem of enterprise software vendors delivering software to multiple clouds. This acquisition will not only improve the support of software vendors onGoogle Cloud Platform, but reinforces Google’s support for the multi-cloud world. We’re providing customers with more choice and flexibility when it comes to running their cloud environment.”

Orbitera was co-founded by Firas Bushnaq and Brian Singer, who came up with the idea for the company to fix some of the “transactional and operational challenges associated with selling software” that they encountered while founding and working at previous tech companies.

Based out of West Hollywood, CA, Orbitera had raised some $2 million in funding from angels like Hiten Shah and Arjun Sethi, Double M Partners and Resolute.vc

SOURCES: TECHCRUNCH