Data ingestion is the process of moving data from various sources into a data warehouse or a data lake for analysis and processing. Data ingestion can be challenging due to the variety, volume and velocity of data sources, as well as the need for data quality and security.
Google offers several tools for data ingestion that can help you overcome these challenges and make your data available for analytics and machine learning. In this blog post, we will introduce some of these tools and how they can help you with different use cases.
Cloud Storage:
A scalable and durable object storage service that can store any type of data, such as structured, unstructured, binary or text. Cloud Storage is ideal for storing large amounts of raw data that can be accessed by other Google services or external applications. You can use Cloud Storage to ingest data from files, streams, APIs or other cloud services.
BigQuery:
A serverless and fully managed data warehouse that can handle petabytes of data and run SQL queries in seconds. BigQuery is ideal for ingesting structured or semi-structured data from various sources, such as Cloud Storage, Cloud Pub/Sub, Cloud Dataflow or external databases. You can use BigQuery to ingest data in batch or streaming mode, and apply transformations and validations on the fly.
Cloud Pub/Sub:
A scalable and reliable messaging service that can deliver real-time data from various sources to various destinations. Cloud Pub/Sub is ideal for ingesting streaming data from devices, sensors, applications or other cloud services. You can use Cloud Pub/Sub to ingest data in a publish-subscribe model, where publishers send messages to topics and subscribers receive messages from subscriptions.
Cloud Dataflow:
A fully managed service for building and running data pipelines that can process both batch and streaming data. Cloud Dataflow is ideal for ingesting complex or unstructured data from various sources, such as Cloud Storage, Cloud Pub/Sub, BigQuery or external APIs. You can use Cloud Dataflow to ingest data in a flexible and scalable way, and apply transformations, enrichments and aggregations on the fly.
These are some of the tools that Google offers for data ingestion. Depending on your use case and requirements, you can choose one or more of these tools to ingest your data into Google Cloud Platform and make it ready for analytics and machine learning.