In late July, Google announced the alpha release of Cloud SQL for Microsoft SQL Server and positioned it as a way for enterprises to “experience fully managed SQL Server with built-in high availability and backup capability” in the cloud.
The specs Google outlined for Cloud SQL are nothing to sneeze at:
- Up to 30 TB of storage
- Up to 60,000 IOPS
- Up to 416 GB memory per instance
- Greater than 99.95% availability
- Automated backups, replication, patches and updates
Clearly the folks at Google are tired of playing third fiddle to AWS and Azure and wanted to up the ante at the cloud-based computing poker table. Google is also going to great lengths to differentiate it’s offering. As Ron Miller at TechCrunch put it, “Google is trying to position itself in the same way as any cloud vendor going after AWS. They are selling themselves as the hybrid cloud company that can help with your digital transformation.”
Google also announced Anthos as a tool to manage workloads. As explained by Urs Hölzle, senior VP for technical infrastructure, “We will support Anthos and AWS and Azure as well, so people get one way to manage their application and that one way works across their on-premise environments and all other clouds.”
Additionally, he said, “I can’t really stress how big a change that is in the industry, because this is really the stack for the next 20 years, meaning that it’s not really about the three different clouds that are all randomly different in small ways. This is the way that makes these three cloud — and actually on-premise environments, too — look the same.”
Is SQL for Microsoft SQL Server right for your business?
Translation: A single managed service for deploying across clouds and no worries about APIs. And it’s far from vaporware: Google has lined up more than 30 hardware and software partners to pull it off. Put it all together and Google may just have a winning hand.
Would you go all-in on Google’s Cloud SQL for Microsoft SQL Server? You can jump in the alpha here. See pricing here.
