Google Associate Cloud EngineerPlanning and configuring a cloud solutionMedium

A startup is deploying a new IoT platform that will ingest millions of small, high-throughput data points per second from devices globally. The data needs to be stored for real-time analytics and quickly queried based on device IDs and timestamps. Which Google Cloud database service is best suited for this workload?

  1. ACloud SQL
  2. BCloud Bigtable
  3. CFirestore
  4. DCloud Spanner
Show answer & explanation

Correct answer: B. Cloud Bigtable

Cloud Bigtable is a wide-column NoSQL database designed for large analytical and operational workloads, making it ideal for high-throughput IoT data ingestion and real-time analytics.

Why the other options are wrong

  • A. Cloud SQL is a relational database, not optimized for high-throughput, low-latency NoSQL workloads like IoT data streams.
  • C. Firestore is a NoSQL document database, better suited for mobile/web app backends and smaller datasets, not the millions of data points per second scale.
  • D. Cloud Spanner is a globally distributed relational database, overkill and potentially more costly for this specific NoSQL, high-throughput use case.

Cloud Bigtable

Cloud Bigtable is a fully managed, petabyte-scale NoSQL database service ideal for large analytical and operational workloads, including IoT, time-series data, and financial data.

  • High throughput and low latency
  • Wide-column NoSQL database
  • Scales to petabytes of data

Memory trick: Bigtable for Big Data from IoT's Big Stream.

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