April 6th, 2008
Google to launch BigTable this week?
It sounds like the press is being briefed on a new service Google is about to release to developers — possibly as early as this week. The service is called BigTable, and it has been proving itself for quite a while as the storage engine behind many Google services.
BigTable is based on the Google File System (GFS) and designed for distribution across thousands of commodity servers that collectively store petabytes of data. Services that rely on it include Google Search, Google Earth and Maps, Google Finance, Google Print, Orkut, YouTube, and Blogger.
People are saying they expect BigTable to be direct competition for Amazon SimpleDB — and I’d have to agree. The only thing I’m wondering about is the pricing strategy. A post from March 29th hinted that it could actually be free, compared to the pay-per-use pricing model for Amazon’s equivalent service.
SimpleDB from Amazon has the following costs assocated with it:
- $0.14 per machine hour
- $0.10 per GB inbound data transfer
- $0.13-$0.18 per GB outbound data transfer
- $1.50 GB/mo data storage
If you think about it, those prices are very reasonable — but Google has the guts to do even better. Potentially much better. If Google opened this up as a free service, imagine the impact that would have. I’m not one hundred percent sure how Google could monetize a service like this if they did make it free though — some people think it could be a way for them to save money on acquisitions. Imagine how much time and effort could be saved if a company purchased by Google already uses Google’s technology?
What do you think? Will Google make BigTable free, or will it be competitively priced with the Amazon equivalent?
Garett Rogers is employed as a programmer for iQmetrix, which specializes in retail management software for the wireless industry. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
