The Google I/O brought some surprises such as the announcement of integration of PHP into its App Engine and opening up of its Google Compute Engine in a bid to compete against Amazon Web Services that rules the IaaS segment. Google adds to its armory by rolling out its Cloud Datastore or Database-as-a-Service (Dbaas). This, along with Compute Engine and App Engine should entice businesses to consider Google as a viable alternative to Amazon. It is a “NoSQL-like” cloud based fully managed database, capable of replication and is scalable. Google claims the Could Store supports ACID transactions, assuring consistency for reads and queries. Google’s Big Table database with Megastore library overlaying it is at the foundation of Cloud Datastore, which is quite different from the technology underlying Amazon AWS. Big Table is Google’s proprietary data storage process based on its File System, SSTable and Chubby Lock Service, forming part of Google App Engine.
It now remains for developers to optimize applications to take advantages of the fluidity of Google’s App Engine and Compute Engine along with its new programming language “Go” to help the search giant take a lead.
Amazon, to its credit, has a lead of over seven years in this segment, has been tried and found reliable and offers a range of services like virtual server instances, hosted data warehouse and devops services.
Google Cloud Datastore offers the same high replication datastore as is used by App Engine apps. It also offers fast queries regardless of dataset size and data is replicated across data centers for safety. It can be used from any application or language.
Image source:- lumity.org
