How important is it for a company to be multicloud? Crate.io just announced that it was extending its database service to Google Cloud, the last of the big three (along with AWS and Microsoft Azure) to welcome a service that Crate calls an “operational and reporting data store.” Now users will be able to fire up CrateDB instances in any of these big three or in their servers in their own data centers. 

“I have to admit that they were — I wouldn’t say smitten — but our technology is open source and Google’s technologies are also open source and so they worked together seamlessly,” said Eva Schönleitner, the CEO of Crate.io. “There was a strong fit with each other’s code, so we didn’t have to change anything.” 

The announcement highlights how the clouds are becoming sales and delivery channels for large software companies. While users could have always downloaded the software before and installed it themselves, Crate’s move smooths out all the wrinkles that might be waiting.

Crate.io makes its move

The move is just the first step for the company. CrateDB is already in the various marketplaces for other clouds like AWS, and Crate wants to open this pathway soon.  

“The question is: How does someone buy a database?” asked Schönleitner. “What you do is try it first and then you see whether you like it. That is actually what my experience is, especially for open-source products.”

The cloud remains the simplest way for developers to try new software. They can fire up an instance and begin a trial in minutes. The testing may only cost a few cents per hour. A developer can investigate a new potential database in less than the cost of a small cup of basic coffee. 

Crate’s database is designed to ingest great volumes of data, often from the relentless streams from applications like sensors on the internet of things or from industrial venues. The company, which began in 2013, built CrateDB around the Lucene text search engine. Other companies like Elastic and AWS offer solid services that deliver Lucene and its enhanced cousins Solr and Elasticsearch. Crate added an additional layer that imitates the PostgreSQL version of SQL, making it attractive to database administrators who like that syntax. 

“We bring that [data] in and it gets analyzed, all in real-time or near real-time extremely fast,” said Schönleitner. “It’s highly performant, seven by 24. That’s what our database is really good for.”

The product is not limited to the big three cloud providers. Users in China can find versions running on local clouds. They can also buy a service directly from Crate.io. The new service, though, ensures that users will not need to go very far to find the database. 

“The product itself is the same product, and that is one of our core philosophies,” said Schönleitner. “Our principles are to always have the full product and not some snippet or a half-baked one.”