Accelerating the database transformation journey into 2022!

If you're like me, 2021 flew by. Actually, it felt both long and short at once. We hoped things would look different than in 2020, but for most of us, working from home continued. And as was true for most of the pandemic, we yearned for more time with friends and family, especially when they were distant and in need. Through it all, we remained hopeful.?

If you got a chance to see Google’s Year in Search video, the world searched ‘how to heal’ more than ever. And while the last couple of years have been challenging, I continue to be in awe of the resilience of this community, our customers, partners, and my team at Google Cloud.?

It has been gratifying to work closely with customers and, with the support from our partners, to help accelerate their digital transformation journey. We made huge strides over the past year and here are a few I am most proud of:

1. Helping our customers through their digital transformation journey. Customers such as Stubhub, The Home Depot, Wayfair, ShareChat, and Twitter continued to deliver new user-facing applications and features faster with our transformative database solutions. It’s been especially gratifying to see strong engineering-to-engineering relationships form with our customers which has allowed us to build trust and participate in joint feature development.
2. Accelerating product innovation. In order to support our customers’ accelerated transformation journey, we had to accelerate our own innovation. We rapidly expanded our team, and delivered major customer-driven enhancements to support the migration of their workloads, the transformation of their data-driven applications, and the modernization of their organizations. We saw accelerated delivery velocity in Cloud SQL, our fully managed PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server service, including new major versions across all engines and industry-leading availability. We launched two new services, Datastream and Database Migration Service, to ease the migration and replication of databases. And we put a huge focus on developer experience, with new observability innovations across all database engines. We also made Spanner, the most scalable and available relational database in the market, accessible to more developers with a PostgreSQL interface and an entry point at 1/10th of the cost.
3. Finally, reaching new heights and scale with our products. Spanner now processes over 1 billion queries-per-second (QPS) at peak. Bigtable processes over 5 billion QPS at peak and has over 10 exabytes of data under management. And Firestore counts more than 250,000 monthly active developers in its community. So it’s no wonder that Google was named a leader, for the 2nd time, in the 2021 Gartner Cloud DBMS Magic Quadrant.

Of course, the team accomplished more in 2021 than I can possibly fit in this one post. 2022 brings forth new opportunities, and I couldn’t be more excited for what’s to come. We have an ambitious roadmap that will excite developers, DevOps teams, and tech executives alike. We will be continuing to differentiate our customer experience on availability, price/performance, ease-of-use, observability, and scale.?

On the personal front, I am hoping to restart international travel with my wife and kids so we can go and see members of our family that live thousands of miles away, across the ocean – something we haven’t done for almost three years now!

While 2022 is starting a bit rocky in the midst of another pandemic surge, I am hopeful that it passes quickly, and that we have a great year of health and positive data-driven transformation ahead of us.