Google Cloud’s BigQuery Omni for Multi-cloud Analytics
A recent Gartner research survey on cloud adoption revealed that more than 80-percent of respondents using the public cloud were using more than one Cloud Service Provider (CSP .
To address this multi-cloud reality, Google Cloud has announced BigQuery Omni, a multi-cloud analytics solution that enables customers to bring the power of BigQuery to data stored in Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Azure (coming soon). BigQuery Omni provides enterprises with the flexibility they need to break down silos and create actionable business insights, all without having to pay expensive egress fees for moving data from other cloud providers to Google Cloud.
Data is one of the most important assets for driving digital transformation, but is often siloed across on-premises machines, proprietary systems, or multiple clouds. Powered by Google Cloud’s Anthos, BigQuery Omni will allow customers to seamlessly connect directly to their data across Google Cloud, AWS and Azure for analysis without having to move or copy datasets. Through a single user interface, customers will be able to analyze data in the region where it is stored, providing a unified analytics experience.
Anthos is a hybrid and multi-cloud application platform that provides a consistent development and operations experience for cloud and on-premises environments. Anthos ensures a secure and seamless connection between Google Cloud and the other public clouds, so customers can securely run analytics with a fully-managed infrastructure.
“For our customers, data is no longer one room in the house — it’s the foundation. However, moving data across different clouds is both cumbersome and expensive,” said Debanjan Saha, General Manager and Vice President of Engineering, Google Cloud. “With BigQuery Omni, customers will get a multi-cloud analytics solution that enables them to gain critical data insights, in one unified experience. We continue to invest in multi-cloud in an effort to democratise access to the best technologies for our customers, no matter what cloud provider they’re using today.”
Single source of truth, please
MD of Katana Logic, Heoh Chin Fah had commented, “The ‘data warehouse in the cloud’ managed services of Big Query is underpinned by Google Anthos, its hybrid cloud infra and service management platform based on GKE (Google Kubernetes Engine). The containerised applications, both on-prem and in the multi-clouds, would allow Anthos to secure and orchestrate infra, services and policy management under one roof.”
However, there remain a few unanswered questions for Chin Fah, for example: The data repositories remain in each cloud is good to address data sovereignty, data security concerns but it did not mention how it addresses “single source of truth” across multi-clouds.
He observed, “The need to remove duplicates of data, sorting, merging, filtering can be challenging, and unless and until there are ways or tools to ensure that data handling and enablement across multi-clouds, the thoughts of data silos remain.
“At particular data points, data from different data repositories has to joined to be relevant. This was not mentioned clearly, or perhaps a deeper dive is need to understand more.”
1 “Gartner, The Future of Cloud Data Management is Multicloud, December 2019”
(This is a press release that has been surmised by EITN, with opinion added by an industry expert).