Google Launches Bigtable, A Big Managed Database In The Cloud

Google's early work on Bigtable influenced a range of web-scale database developments, including Cassandra, HBase, and the NSA's Accumulo. The company has continued to develop and depend upon Bigtable internally, and now it's launching a managed version in the cloud for anyone to use. This market is pretty crowded, but Google bets that customers will pay to get management and support from a company that clearly knows how to run these things at scale.