Dedicated to the people I love and the God I trust.
—Navin Sabharwal
Dedicated to my family for being my rock and guiding light and to my God who shades every step of my life.
—Shakuntala Gupta Edward
Back in 2009, a new term was coined—“Big Data”. Big Data is data that has a high volume, is generated at a high velocity, and has multiple varieties. This is data with the three Vs—Volume, Velocity, and Variety. Convergence of several technology trends fueled the progress further.
On the one side, Big Data poses challenges to organizations to store, transport, secure, process, mine, and serve that data. Cloud Computing on the other hand provides support to address these challenges by provisioning shared resources, such as compute, database storage, networking, security, and analytical offerings. In effect, the combination of both is spearheading new innovations in technology.
The Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is a suite of cloud computing services offered by Google. They run on the same infrastructure that Google uses internally for its own end-user products, such as Google search, Google Photos, YouTube, Gmail, etc. GCP services are well positioned for the modern application development user and have some unique offerings in the data storage, Big Data analytics, artificial intelligence, and containerization spaces. Google continues to innovate and strengthen its offerings.
This book takes a deep dive into the relational database service offering of Google—Cloud SQL and Cloud Spanner.
These database offerings from Google Cloud are increasingly being used by enterprises to develop their modern digital applications. The aim of this book is to provide guidance and best practices to architect applications using GCP database offerings.
Cloud SQL is Google’s fully managed relational database service with two choices of database engine—MySQL and PostgreSQL.
Cloud Spanner is Google’s fully managed NewSQL database service, offering high availability with an industry leading 99.999% availability SLA.
Time is valuable, more so in today’s world of ever-increasing data. We thank you for spending your valuable time and investing in reading this book.
We sincerely hope that you’ll find the coverage useful and will be able to architect, develop, and manage GCP database offerings. We hope that you enjoy reading the book as much as we enjoyed writing it.
Wishing you the best on your cloud and Big Data journey.
To my family, Shweta and Soumil, for being always by my side and letting me sacrifice their time for my intellectual and spiritual pursuits. For taking care of everything while I am immersed in authoring. This and the other accomplishments of my life wouldn’t have been possible without your love and support. To my mom and sister for their love and support as always; without your blessings, nothing is possible.
To my co-author, Shakutala. This is the third book we authored together and the journey over the last 10 years has been enriching. Thank you for your hard work and quick turnarounds.
To my team here at HCL who has been a source of inspiration with their hard work, ever engaging technical conversations, and their technical depth. Your everflowing ideas are a source of happiness and excitement every single day. Piyush Pandey, Sarvesh Pandey, Amit Agrawal, Vasand Kumar, Punith Krishnamurthy, Sandeep Sharma, Amit Dwivedi, Gauarv Bhardwaj, Nitin Narotra, Shoyeb, Divjot, Nitin Chand, and Vivek—thank you for being there and making technology fun.
To Celestine and Aditee and the entire team at Apress, for turning our ideas into a reality. It has been an amazing experience authoring with you over the years. The speed of the decision making and the editorial support have both been excellent.
To all my co-authors, colleagues, managers, mentors, and guides, it was and is an enriching experience to be associated with you and to learn from you.
Thank you goddess Saraswati, for guiding us to the path of knowledge and spirituality.
असतो मा साद गमय, तमसो मा ज्योतिर् गमय, मृत्योर मा अमृतम् गमय
(Asato Ma Sad Gamaya, Tamaso Ma Jyotir Gamaya, Mrityor Ma Amritam Gamaya)
Lead us from ignorance to truth, lead us from darkness to light, lead us from death to deathlessness.
—Navin Sabharwal
First and foremost, my utmost thanks to my entire family. To my mom and dad (without you I am nothing), to Nitya (you are the very soul of my life, be you always), to Eddy (my husband, friend, and partner in crime), to Bindu, Eliz, and Vicky (for your love, being the energy in my life; you guys keep me grounded), to Amar, Jey, and Asper (for being there always), to my Savari mom and dad-in-law (for your support and blessings), and not to forget Ria, Asper, and Steve (my little angels). Without your unfaltering love and support, I would never be what I am today. Words cannot say enough.
I would like to thank my co-author Navin for believing in me and pushing me always to deliver my best.
Special mention to Ayush Aggarwal and Raja Bhattacharya, for helping me with the code in the book.
—Shakuntala Gupta Edward
has more than 20 years of industry experience and is an innovator, thought leader, patent holder, and author in the areas of cloud computing, artificial intelligence and machine learning, public cloud, DevOps, AIOPS, DevOps, infrastructure services, monitoring and managing platforms, Big Data analytics, and software product development. Navin is responsible for DevOps, artificial intelligence, cloud lifecycle management, service management, monitoring and management, IT ops analytics, AIOPs and machine learning, automation, operational efficiency of scaled delivery through Lean ops, and strategy and delivery for HCL Technologies. He is reachable at[email protected] and https://www.linkedin.com/in/navinsabharwal .
is an accomplished consultant in the areas of data and analytics with more than 16 years of experience. Shakuntala is a Big Data architect and is responsible for database design, database architecture, best practices for Big Data technologies, product development using databases, Big Data, NoSQL, analytics, and machine learning technologies. She has authored books on Big Data analytics, includingPractical MongoDB from Apress. She is reachable at https://in.linkedin.com/in/shakuntala-edward-70343627/ .
works as a deputy general manager in the HCL DRYiCE practice, focusing on creating solutions catering to cloud adoption (including cloud landing zone, migration, and operations), automation, orchestration, and cloud lifecycle management.
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