Google Cloud with BigTable for Content Management – Reference Architecture & Cost Estimate

TSG has recently been working on validating its HBase implementation of OpenContent Management Suite against the Google Cloud BigTable NoSQL database. This post is going to provide some details on how the architecture of BigTable works with OpenContent, as well as help with the sizing of the Google Cloud infrastructure for a typical instance.

Google Bigtable was incubated at Google in 2006 as a solution to Google’s growing “data problem”. As Google rolled Bigtable, the Apache foundation was developing HBase as an open source implementation of Bigtable. Since HBase was based on the Bigtable paper published by Google, the overall architecture and access patterns for Bigtable and HBase are remarkably similar. When Google started offering Bigtable as a SaaS NoSQL database in 2016, they offered developers the option to leverage the HBase Java API directly to interact with Google Bigtable. This meant that developers for applications leveraging HBase as their database were able to leverage Bigtable almost immediately in order to take advantage of Google’s expertise in managing large amounts of data.

TSG has offered its OpenContent Management Suite on top of HBase dating back to January 2015 for those looking to leverage a modern NoSQL database for content management. Our expertise in HBase for content management meant that we were quickly able to validate our solution against GCP Bigtable. Our experience has been consistent with running Azure HDInsight or AWS to let the cloud vendors manage and support the database components of the platform for you rather than maintaining the support staff to keep the database online and performant.

The below reference architecture for OpenContent Management Suite on top of Google Cloud BigTable for metadata storage and Google Storage for Content file Storage:

Please click below to download the costing estimate or to contact us for more information: