Google's Big Data Game Takes Its Next Step

The Google Cloud Platform, increasingly focused on analytics and data processing, made generally available a suite of tools Wednesday that will further up its game as a workhorse for big data applications.

Google, soon to be a subsidiary of a holding company called Alphabet, ended the beta period for two big data tools: Cloud Dataflow and Cloud Pub/Sub.

"These fully-managed services remove the operational burden found in traditional data processing systems," said Eric Schmidt and Rohit Khare, project managers for the new tools, in a blog post.

[Related: Google Cloud Dataflow Makes Big Data Offerings Even Bigger]

"They enable you to build applications on a platform that can scale with the growth of your business and drive down data processing latency, all while processing your data efficiently and reliably," the two project managers said in the post.

Pub/Sub offers asynchronous messaging between independent applications. Dataflow ties together Google's Compute Engine IaaS offering with two other services, Cloud Storage and Big Query, to enable users to execute data processing jobs at massive scales.

"Cloud Dataflow is built to free you from the operational overhead related to large scale cluster management and optimization," Schmidt and Khare wrote in the blog.

Google simultaneously announced that the latest version of Cloudera's popular Director platform for running Hadoop in the cloud will include Google Cloud Platform integration, further ramping up the big data chops of its cloud.

All of the managed big data services Google is introducing are intended to ease the complexity faced by business users interested in executing advanced data processing tasks, according to Google.

Dj Das, founder and CEO of Third Eye Consulting, a Google partner based in San Francisco that specializes in leveraging Cloud Platform for big data projects, told CRN that the general release marks an important milestone in the maturity of Google Cloud Platform.

"It allows us to have discussions with more confidence about introducing these products to prospective clients knowing that there won't be push-backs from their technical team based on its status," Das told CRN.

"From a competitive standpoint, it simply makes Google a much more viable Cloud provider in the ecosystem."

PUBLISHED AUG. 12, 2015