The IT giant Google Cloud has introduced a highly flexible and multi cloud analytics solution BigQuery Omni that lets users to cost-effectively access and securely analyze data across Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Azure (coming soon), without leaving the familiar BigQuery user interface (UI). This allows customers to break down data silos and gain critical business insights from a single pane of glass using standard SQL and the same BigQuery APIs. As BigQuery Omni is powered by Anthos, users can query data without taking the trouble to manage the underlying infrastructure.
A recent survey by Gartner on latest cloud adoption trends revealed that more than 80% of public cloud users rely on more than one cloud service provider. As data is a major component of decision making across organizations, BigQuery Omni serves as a great innovation and commitment to multi cloud strategy. It brings users the best analytics and data warehouse technology, even if their data is scattered across multiple public clouds.
How it works
Moving data between various cloud providers is a costly affair and is not plausible for many businesses. BigQuery Omni is a new way of analyzing data stored across multiple public clouds. It is made possible by a separation of compute and storage through which BigQuery provides scalable storage that can reside in Google Cloud or other public clouds, and stateless resilient compute that executes standard SQL queries.
With BigQuery Omni users won’t have to incur additional cost of moving data from one public cloud to another. The BigQuery interface on Google Cloud will let the user query the data that have been stored in Google Cloud, AWS and Azure without any cross-cloud movement or copying of data.
BigQuery Omni’s query engine manages the needed compute on clusters in the same place where the user data is stored. It runs on Anthos clusters and is fully managed by Google Cloud. The new technology allows the user to securely execute queries on other public clouds as well.
How to get started with BigQuery Omni
The user can begin with familiar BigQuery user interface on Google Cloud and select the public cloud region where the data is located, and run the query. There’s no need to format or transform the data, because BigQuery Omni supports Avro, CSV, JSON, ORC, and Parquet. Computation occurs within BigQuery’s multi tenant service running on the AWS region where the data is currently located.
BigQuery gets the data from data storage within the user account once they get authorized permissions through other public clouds’ IAM roles. The data is moved only temporarily within AWS from the customer’s data storage to the BigQuery clusters running on Anthos to execute queries.