Go global with Cloud Bigtable

Cloud Bigtable customer Oden Technologies was keen to boost the availability and durability of their service for their worldwide industrial automation customers.

“Google Cloud Bigtable is an essential component of Oden Technologies’ real-time analytics,” says James Maidment, Director of Infrastructure. “Our analytics enable our customers in manufacturing to eliminate waste and quality defects in their production process. In order for Oden to be a truly mission-critical tool and competitive with existing solutions, our customers need to trust that our service will be online when they need it most. The Cloud Bigtable multi-region replication allows us to guarantee and deliver the availability and durability our customers expect from Oden.”

You can configure a replication topology using any zones where Cloud Bigtable is available, or add clusters in additional regions to an existing instance without any downtime. Additionally, the flexible replication model provided by Cloud Bigtable lets you reconfigure your instance’s replication topology at any time by allowing you to add or remove clusters for any existing instance, even if you are currently writing data to that instance.

Here’s what happens when you add a cluster to an existing instance:

• First, all existing data will be bulk-replicated from the existing cluster to the new one
• Then, all future writes to any cluster will be replicated to all other clusters in the instance

All tables within an instance are replicated to all clusters, and you can monitor replication progress for each table via the Tables list in the GCP Console.

Moving data between regions in Cloud Bigtable

To move data from one region to another, just add a new cluster in the desired location, and then remove the old cluster. The old cluster remains available until data has been replicated to the new cluster, so you don’t have to worry about losing any writes. You can continue writing to Cloud Bigtable, since it takes care of replicating data automatically.

Cloud Bigtable in more GCP regions

We are also happy to announce the latest regional launch of Cloud Bigtable in Sao Paulo, Brazil, as we continue to deploy Cloud Bigtable in more locations to bring the performance and reliability of the popular wide-column database service to more customers.

Additionally, we’ve recently added Cloud Bigtable in Mumbai, India; Hong Kong; and Sydney, Australia, making Cloud Bigtable available in 17 total regions. Here are all the current Cloud Bigtable regions, with more coming in the near future: