Google Bigtable is a data storage solution for extremely large sets of flat, loosely structured data. First put into internal use in 2005, Bigtable was designed to address the data needs of some of Google's most demanding services, such as indexing the internet, Gmail, Google Earth, and YouTube. All of these services must quickly store and act on several petabytes of data.
In 2006, Google researchers published Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data, which outlined the driving philosophy and architecture behind Bigtable. This had a major influence on many other database technologies, including Apache HBase and Cassandra. As we've seen, Bigtable plays a central role in many other products in the Google Cloud sphere, including Datastore and Firestore. In May 2015, Google released Bigtable as a standalone managed service in the Google...