News

Google Cloud's BigQuery Omni Connects Users to AWS and Azure

• By John K. Waters
• July 16, 2020

Google Cloud introduced a new multicloud analytics solution this week that allows the BigQuery petabyte-scale data warehouse service to connect directly to data stored in other clouds.

Announced on Tuesday during the Google Cloud Next '20: OnAir event, BigQuery Omni enables users to query data stored in Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services (in a private alpha) and (in the near future) Microsoft's Azure. To run BigQuery previously, the user's data had to be stored in Google Cloud.

"For our customers, data is no longer one room in the house," said Google Cloud GM Debanjan Saha in a statement, "it's the foundation. However, moving data across different clouds is both cumbersome and expensive. With BigQuery Omni, customers will get a multi-cloud analytics solution that enables them to gain critical data insights, in one unified experience."

BigQuery Omni runs on Anthos, Google Cloud's hybrid multicloud application platform announced at last year's Cloud Next conference. The platform comprises the Anthos Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Config Management, Service Mesh and security components. BigQuery itself, which turned 10 years old in May of this year, is the public implementation of Google's Dremel query engine. The BigQuery architecture decouples compute and storage, allowing Dremel to interrogate data in other cloud services, eliminating the need to migrate entire data sets to a single host.

"BigQuery Omni represents a new way of analyzing data stored in multiple public clouds, which is made possible by BigQuery's separation of compute and storage," Saha explained in a blog post. "By decoupling these two, BigQuery provides  scalable storage that can reside in Google Cloud or other public clouds, and stateless resilient compute that executes standard SQL queries."

With this release, Google Cloud is acknowledging a "multi-cloud reality," and the need of organizations 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."

"As hybrid and multi-cloud adoption has become the norm, enterprises are increasingly looking for data products that provide a consistent experience and lower complexity of using multiple clouds, while enabling the ongoing use of existing infrastructure investments," said 451 Research analyst Matt Aslett in a statement. "The launch of BigQuery Omni demonstrates Google Cloud's strategy to help customers operate multi-cloud environments."

Today, BigQuery Omni is available in Private Alpha for AWS S3, with Azure support coming soon, Google Cloud says. BigQuery Omni supports Avro, CSV, JSON, ORC, and Parquet. Companies interested in trying out BigQuery Omni can fill out this form.