Make your database

your secret advantage

with Google Cloud

Google Cloud offers trusted databases for

radically transformative applications
Table of contents

Executive Summary 03

What’s driving digital transformation for businesses? 04

Do your databases enable transformation--or hold you back? 05

Google Cloud databases power today’s modern applications 06

Trusted platform for radically transformative customer experiences 09

Unified data lifecycle for intelligent applications 10

Freedom to work the way you want 11

A faster way to create innovative applications for customers 12

Accelerate your transformation journey with Google Cloud 13

Get started with a database assessment 14

Make your database your secret advantage with Google Cloud 2

Executive Summary
This guide provides an introduction to Google Cloud databases tailored
for technology decision makers and executives. It provides real-world
customer stories that illustrate how leading organizations use Google
Cloud database services and details about how you can partner with
Google to unlock the power of your data.

In today’s connected, digital world, organizations need to find new ways

to continuously wow their customers. Running modern applications
on legacy, on-premises databases requires overcoming expensive,
time-consuming challenges around latency, throughput, availability,
and scaling, which makes it hard to invest in innovation. Moving to
Google Cloud databases provides the agility you need to transform
your business on the platform trusted for innovation. It allows you to
deliver great customer experiences while maintaining your freedom to
work the way you want. Plus, Google Cloud offers unified services that
provide a faster way to build new features and applications and unify
your entire data lifecycle.

Through the course of this guide, we’ll demonstrate how fully managed
Google Cloud databases can help you meet the ever-changing
requirements of modern applications and create great customer
experiences that will transform your business.

Make your database your secret advantage with Google Cloud 3

Customer expectations
drive transformation
across industries
Today’s consumers expect amazing feats of speed
and service delivered through easy-to-use apps and
personalized interactions.

Modern conveniences, like buy-online and pick-up in store, instant

digital payments, and real-time ride sharing requests, have taught
consumers that their experience is paramount—no matter how
big the company, how complex the problem, or how regulated the
industry. At the heart of our always-on, digitally connected world
lies a new type of application that provides users with real-time
information at a global scale.

Across industries, digital innovators use these new types of

applications and data to deliver seamless, personalized experiences.
For example, omni-channel experiences in retail have become
the new normal for many consumers. Financial services empower
consumers to interact with their bank in real time through mobile
or online apps. And every day millions of people book and pay for
a rideshare through their smartphones, expecting service in a few
minutes. Innovation at this scale and speed has triggered massive
business transformation—even cultural shifts—further reinforcing
the notion to consumers that anything is possible.

It’s an exciting time for sure, but it’s also a lot of pressure for
companies and their development teams, as users’ growing
expectations continue to up the ante.

Make your database your secret advantage with Google Cloud 4

Transformation hinges on new
cloud database capabilities
A key step to building all-new customer experiences is to select the operational
databases that power your applications and, in essence, run your business. Your choice
of operational databases can either abstract away the complexity of running a secure,
high-performance platform for modern applications and empower your team to
innovate, or it can be the bottleneck that degrades the application experience and eats
up valuable developer time on tasks like maintenance, performance tuning, and scaling.

When building modern applications for a modern business, keep in mind the following
critical tenets of choosing cloud-based operational databases:

Pressing the gas on innovation requires Today’s world doesn’t stop and wait while you
transformative capabilities. New always-on rebuild your database. Moving to the cloud
business models require applications to be highly shouldn’t derail your developers or send them back
reliable, continuously available, and seamlessly to coding class. You want a cloud platform that
scalable to ensure every user in every region has provides an easy on-ramp for migrating applications
a positive experience. They require starting with from legacy commercial databases, and keeps
cloud database services that raise the bar on up with the latest in open source tooling and
performance, availability, scalability, and security. development languages, so you can migrate from
on-premises to cloud without missing a beat.
By 2026, enterprises that successfully
generate digital innovation will derive over 83% of respondents say cloud services
25% of revenue from digital products, that allow their organizations to deliver
services, and/or experiences.1 new capabilities with existing skill sets are
important for extracting the full business
value of data.3

While data is born in an operational database,

that is only the first part of its journey. The
most innovative organizations are able to unify
the entire data lifecycle by bringing together Automation goes a long way to help you build
databases, analytics, and AI/ML in a continuous, quickly. Keeping your business agile and responsive
connected environment. in today’s new world means finding new ways to
help developers be creative. You would like solutions
Only 32% of companies reported being that use advanced automation to free them up from
able to realize tangible and measurable hardware and software management tasks, and that
value from data.2 seamlessly scale resources to meet demand.

1. IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Future of Digital Innovation 2022 Predictions.

Oct 2021 - Doc # US47148621
2. Accenture
3. Turning Data into Unmatched Business Value, Harvard Business Review
Analytic Services

Make your database your secret advantage with Google Cloud 5

Google Cloud databases power
today’s modern applications
Google Cloud databases provide the foundation for building radically
transformative applications by enabling a modern database strategy
that is trusted, unified, open, and agile.

Trusted platform for Unified data lifecycle for

transformative experiences intelligent applications
Build and innovate with the highest levels of Integrate with our large ecosystem of
availability, reliability, global scale and security industry-leading data and AI services to
based on decades of our first-hand expertise. break down operational silos.

Freedom to work the way A faster way to create

you want applications
Choose from the most popular commercial and Go from idea to product faster with fully
open-source engines to reduce your learning managed database services that include
curve, help ease your migration to the cloud advanced features and capabilities like
and increase the value of your investments. built-in automation that frees you to work
on your applications.

Make your database your secret advantage with Google Cloud 6

Google Cloud offers database services for any app and use case

How well do you know your relations?

Relational databases store information in tables, Non-relational databases (or NoSQL databases)
rows and columns that structure the data. They store complex, unstructured data in a non-tabular
use relational semantics (i.e. a column in one form such as documents and key-value stores.
table can point to data in another table) to ensure Non-relational databases are often used when
data consistency and enable complex queries large quantities of complex and diverse data need
across multiple tables. Relational databases are to be organized, or where the structure of the
used when the structure of the data doesn’t data is regularly evolving to meet new business
change often, such as in banking or supply chain requirements, such as personalization and web and
inventory management. mobile applications.

Make your database your secret advantage with Google Cloud 7

Which database should I use?

GCP operational databases meet 100% of the required

criteria specified in Gartner’s Solution Criteria for
Operational Database Platform as a Service.4

Gartner, Solution Scorecard for Google Cloud Platform Operational Databases, July 2021,
Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications
and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or
other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s Research
& Advisory organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims
all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of
merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S.
and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

4. Gartner Solution Scorecard for Google Cloud

Platform Operational Databases, July 2021

Make your database your secret advantage with Google Cloud 8

Trusted platform for
radically transformative
customer experiences
Google Cloud databases provide a ground-breaking platform for
innovation based on decades of our own first-hand experiences
with shaping the digital world. We offer industry leading availability, Customers trust Google
reliability, global scale, and security, enabling you to deliver the best Cloud databases to
possible experiences for your customers from anywhere in just a help them create real
few clicks. Our one-of-a-kind databases, like Spanner, Bigtable, and competitive advantage
Firestore, provide industry-leading, five 9’s SLA (99.999%) to support
your always-on applications. Ensure compliance, business continuity, ShareChat uses Google Cloud
databases to run the leading
redundancy, and reliability using the same secure-by-design
Indian social media platform with
infrastructure, built-in data protection and replication, and multi- more than 160 million monthly
layered security that we trust to run our own Google workloads. active users sharing and viewing
videos, images, GIFs, songs, and
With Cloud Spanner, you get the benefits of relational semantics at much more.
global scale. Spanner processes over 1 billion requests per second
ShareChat migrated from a
at peak. Cloud Bigtable provides a NoSQL database service built to
NoSQL database to relational
handle your high-throughput, low-latency applications. Bigtable has database Spanner for its global
more than 10 Exabytes of data under management. Our fully managed, consistency and secondary
scalable, and serverless document database, Firestore, makes it easy indexing, which reduced cost by
to develop rich web and mobile applications. Firestore has more than 30 percent. When the company’s
250K monthly active developers. traffic grew to 500 percent over
the span of just a few days, it
managed to scale horizontally
with zero lines of code change.

Learn more

Cloud Spanner Cloud Bigtable Firestore

Spanner processes over Bigtable has more than Firestore apps power more than

1 billion 10 Exabytes 750M

requests per second at peak of data under management monthly active end-users using
Firebase Auth
Figure: Access ground-breaking technologies that power Google applications, like Search,
YouTube, Gmail, and Maps used by billions of users.

Make your database your secret advantage with Google Cloud 9

Unified data lifecycle for
intelligent applications
Google Cloud databases integrate with the larger ecosystem of
market-leading services that make up Google Cloud services,
such as: BigQuery, which provides a cloud data warehouse; Google Customers transform
Kubernetes Engine (GKE), a fully managed Kubernetes service; their business
Dataflow for data processing; Datastream, providing change using Google Cloud
data capture and replication as a serverless service; Pub/Sub for databases to adopt a
messaging; and Cloud Functions which delivers functions as a unified data strategy
service. Together, these services help you break down operational
silos, build data pipelines, generate real-time insights, and make Mercari, Inc., Japan’s largest
better business decisions. Through our native integrations, we make C2C marketplace, launched
its app in 2013 which allows
it easy to unify your data lifecycle while ensuring you get the best of
18.2 million monthly users to
Google Cloud at every stage of your development. easily and securely buy new
and used items. When Mercari
Bridge the gap between operational data and analytics by using started building Merpay, a new
BigQuery federation to query data residing in Cloud SQL and mobile payment platform, it
Cloud Spanner without moving or copying it. Synchronize data needed a database that would
across databases, storage systems, and applications to support support reliable payment
real-time analytics, database replication, and event-driven processing around the clock.
architectures with native integrations from Datastream to Dataflow, Mercari chose Spanner
Cloud SQL, and Spanner. to achieve up to 99.999%
availability with zero downtime
for planned maintenance and
schema changes.
BigQuery users query over 125 petabytes of Because Cloud Spanner
data in Cloud SQL on average in a month integrates easily with other
Google Cloud data services,
Mercari can easily access its
data in Spanner for analytical
insights that enhance the
business, such as fraud
detection. Mercari uses Pub/
Sub, Dataflow, and Apache
Flink to create batch and
streaming data pipelines that
pull data from the Spanner
databases that run each
microservice. The combined
data is loaded into BigQuery
for analytics. By using Spanner
and integrated Google Cloud
services, the Merpay platform
is flexible, secure, scalable, and
highly available.

Learn more

Make your database your secret advantage with Google Cloud 10

Freedom to work
the way you want
Google Cloud services support MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, SQL
Server and Redis, the most popular commercial and open-source
engines, which helps you reduce your learning curve, benefit from Customers have the
the latest enhancements and fixes, and ease your migration to the freedom to work however
cloud. We also work closely with partners such as MongoDB to they want with the fully
offer you a breadth of solutions and help you get the most value managed services and
from your existing investments. Google Cloud databases support open platform enabled by
hybrid and multi-cloud deployments, and we help you move your
Google Cloud databases
existing workloads and applications to Google through the first-ever
serverless Database Migration Service (DMS), designed to make Songkick, the U.K.-based concert
migration easier, faster, more predictable, and more reliable. Use discovery service owned by
Datastream to synchronize data from Oracle and MySQL databases Warner Music Group, adopted
Cloud SQL for MySQL for all four
to BigQuery, Spanner, and Cloud SQL, with minimal latency.
of its databases which handle
approximately
Choose the best path to modernization for your Oracle workloads 1.25 TB of data.
and applications by migrating to Bare Metal Solution for Oracle,
a Google Cloud service that provides reliable, secure, and high- By moving to Google, Songkick
performance database infrastructure for your Oracle workloads. no longer has to deal with
database infrastructure
Bare Metal Solution for Oracle offers low-latency integration
management issues like hardware
with with other Google Cloud services like BigQuery and Google failure, and software upgrades.
Compute Engine. Google also offers El Carro, an open-source This saves the company over a
Kubernetes operator that automates routine Oracle database month of testing and prep work
administration tasks, so you can migrate and support your Oracle that was previously required for
workloads in hybrid and multi-cloud environments. its physical servers.

Learn more

Figure: Managed services for quickly and safely migrating your databases

Make your database your secret advantage with Google Cloud 11

A faster way to
create applications
Google Cloud databases help you go from idea to product
faster by offering advanced features and capabilities as part of
a fully managed service. Empower your developers to iterate Customers use Google
and deploy quickly through our intuitive UI and automated Cloud databases to help
provisioning and management. them quickly transform
their entire business
Our managed database services, like Cloud SQL, make it easy
for developers to automate the process of creating, modifying, Auto Trader wanted to improve
cloning, and duplicating database servers. We complement the process of buying and selling
vehicles in the UK by creating
your existing application performance monitoring (APM) and
a platform for consumers to
observability tools by providing database metrics and traces connect with retailers and
through the OpenTelemetry open standard. manufacturers. As Auto Trader
grew, it needed to move faster.
Historically, the company ran
a massive on-premises Oracle
database. Moving to Cloud
SQL helped Auto Trader create
a seamless development
experience.
Since modernizing to Google
Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Istio,
and Cloud SQL, Auto Trader’s
release cadence has improved
by over 140 percent (year over
year), enabling 458 releases to
production in a single day. Auto
Trader’s fast-paced delivery
platform managed over 36,000
releases in a year.

Learn more

Make your database your secret advantage with Google Cloud 12

Accelerate your
transformation journey
with Google Cloud
Whether you want to increase your agility and pace of innovation,
better manage your costs, or entirely shut down data centers, we
can help you accelerate your move to the cloud by following a
three-phase journey: migration, modernization, and transformation.
Of course every organization’s journey will look very different, but
this is one way you can think about your move to the cloud.

If you need to move many applications and databases to the cloud

quickly, we offer a fast-track approach to lift and shift what you’re
running today to managed database services. Once migrated, you
can modernize your database environment by transitioning off
your legacy databases onto open source or cloud-native solutions.
Finally, you can choose to build next-gen applications entirely in the
cloud, and our cloud-native databases are designed to accelerate
your transformation.

Wherever you are in your journey, we’re ready to support you with
the services, best practices, and tooling ecosystem you need for
success. Try our Database Migration Service (DMS), a serverless
offering for confidently migrating to Cloud SQL, and/or Datastream,
a serverless change data capture (CDC) and replication service that
helps you synchronize data across heterogeneous databases for
database replication.

Delight your users and deliver modern experiences by using Google

Cloud databases to help you migrate, modernize, and transform for
the future.

More than 85% of the migrations

using Database Migration Service are
underway in less than an hour.

Make your database your secret advantage with Google Cloud 13

Start your migration with
a database assessment
Moving your organization’s data to the cloud is a big decision. You deserve to know what
you’re in for before you commit. Google Cloud can help you develop a customized plan
that takes the guesswork out of migration.

Ready to make a cloud Looking to connect with an

migration plan? expert first?

Request assessment Get in touch

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

Migrating your databases to managed services

Cloud databases: the secret advantage of digital innovators

Business transformation with cloud databases

Make your database your secret advantage with Google Cloud 14