cloud-test: Easier, faster and lower cost Big Data processing with the Google Cloud Storage Connector for Hadoop

Google Cloud Platform Blog

Easier, faster and lower cost Big Data processing with the Google Cloud Storage Connector for Hadoop

Tuesday, January 14, 2014

fastApache HadoopHadoop on Google Cloud PlatformGoogle Cloud Storage connector for Hadoop

Diagram of Hadoop on Google Cloud Platform. HDFS and the NameNode are optional when storing data in Google Cloud Storage

Google File System (GFS)ColossusGoogle Cloud Storage

Compatibility: The Google Cloud Storage connector for Hadoop code-compatible with Hadoop. Just change the URL to point to your data.

Quick startup: Your data is ready to process. You don’t have to wait for extra minutes or more while your data is copied over to HDFS and the NameNode comes out of safe mode, and you don’t have to pay for the VM time for data copying either.

Greater availability and scalability: Google Cloud Storage is globally replicated and has higher availability than HDFS because it’s independent of the compute nodes and the NameNode. If the VMs are turned down (or, cloud forbid, crash) your data lives on.

Lower costs: Save on storage and compute: storage, because there’s no need to maintain two copies of your data, one for backups and one for running Hadoop; compute, because you don’t need to keep VMs going just to serve data. And with per-minute billing, you can run Hadoop jobs faster on more cores and know your costs aren’t getting rounded up to a whole hour.

No storage management overhead: Whereas HDFS requires routine maintenance -- like file system checks, rebalancing, upgrades, rollbacks and NameNode restarts -- Google Cloud Storage just works. Your data is safe and consistent with no extra effort.

Interoperability: By keeping your data in Google Cloud Storage, you can benefit from all of the other Google services that already play nicely together.

Performance: Google’s infrastructure delivers high performance from Google Cloud Storage that’s comparable to HDFS -- without the overhead and maintenance.