Why Google’s Aiming Multi-Cloud with BigQuery Omni

During its virtual Google Cloud Next ’20 “On Air” series, Google announced the introduction of BigQuery Omni. This is an extension of its existing BigQuery data analytics solution to now analyze data in multiple public clouds, currently including Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services (AWS), with Microsoft Azure coming soon. Powered by Google Cloud’s Anthos, and using a unified interface, BigQuery Omni allows developers to analyze data locally without having to move data sets between the platforms.

BigQuery Engine to Analyze Multi-Cloud Data

Google Cloud’s general manager and VP of engineering, Debanjan Saha, says “BigQuery Omni is an extension of Google Cloud’s continued innovation and commitment to multi-cloud that brings the best analytics and data warehouse technology, no matter where the data is stored.” And that, “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.”

According to Google Cloud, this provides scalable storage that can reside in Google Cloud or other public clouds, and stateless, resilient compute that executes standard SQL queries.

Google Cloud reports that BigQuery Omni will:

• Break down silos and gain insights on data with a flexible, multi-cloud analytics solution that doesn’t require moving or copying data from other public clouds into Google Cloud for analysis.
• Get consistent data experience across clouds and datasets with a unified analytics experience across datasets, in Google Cloud, AWS, and Azure (coming soon) using standard SQL and BigQuery’s familiar interface. BigQuery Omni supports Avro, CSV, JSON, ORC, and Parquet.
• Securely run analytics to another public cloud with a fully managed infrastructure, powered by Anthos, so you can query data without worrying about the underlying infrastructure. Users can choose the public cloud region where their data is located, and run the query.

Why is Google Aiming Multi-Cloud?

Many organizations leveraging public cloud are doing so with multiple clouds: 55% of organizations are multi-cloud according to a recent survey from IDG, and 80% according to a recent Gartner survey. (Is this actually necessary? Maybe.)

Google Cloud has been the most open to supporting this multi-cloud reality, and perhaps implicit in releases like Anthos and BigQuery Omni is Google’s recognition that it’s #3 in the market, and many of its customers have a presence in AWS or Azure.

So, BigQuery Omni actually involves physically running BigQuery clusters in the cloud on which the remote data resides. This is something that in the past, could only be done if your data was stored only in Google Cloud. Now with Kubernetes-powered Anthos, as well as the visualization tool gained in Google’s acquisition of Looker, Google is moving toward a middleware strategy. Now, it is offering services to bridge data silos, as a strategy to gain market share from its bigger competitors. Expect to see more similar service offerings coming from Google as they look to break AWS’s lead on public cloud.

Originally published at www.parkmycloud.com on August 4, 2020