dbt Labs, the pioneer in analytics engineering, is unveiling that dbt Cloud is now deployable on Google Cloud, as well as currently available on the Google Cloud Marketplace. As a natural extension of dbt Cloud, this release reflects dbt Labs’ commitment to meeting its customers where they are and where their data is—while simultaneously boosting data quality and trust in the process.
The debut of dbt Cloud on Google Cloud expands dbt Labs’ reach, broadening its capacity to address enterprises’ data needs in the places it operates. Before this release, many dbt Labs customers were running BigQuery—Google Cloud’s unified, AI-ready data analytics platform—projects on Google through dbt Labs’ AWS infrastructure.
“Customers can currently run BigQuery projects on Google from our AWS infrastructure, but it's far away, and the two clouds have to talk to each other. And to be quite honest, there's an entire set of customers where that is either difficult operationally or not something approved by their business,” explained Mark Porter, CTO of dbt Labs. “We wanted to meet customers where they were.”
Tapping into an existing customer need, dbt Cloud’s Google Cloud availability streamlines and optimizes the dbt Cloud/Google Cloud connection to empower teams to build and manage faster, more efficient data and AI workflows on BigQuery. Mutual customers benefit from knowing more about their data, however they decide to architect it, while centralizing spend, according to dbt Labs.
“Giving people this access on Google is essential, because obviously so many people use Google and BigQuery… [and the value of dbt Cloud] is [that] we know more about a company's data than either the company itself or the data warehouse vendor,” said Porter. “We know how fresh the data is; we know whether the data has changed shape; we know whether the data has been updated recently; we know whether someone changed a dashboard, because they do it through dbt.”
Additionally, the availability of dbt Cloud on Google Cloud expands its capacity to help enterprises meet complex, rigid data residency and compliance requirements. Now deployable on Google Cloud, Azure, and AWS, dbt Cloud can “get into a different set of countries and a different set of geographies with a different set of data residency requirements quicker by being on all three clouds,” said Porter.
This collaboration also yields an expansion of dbt Labs’ BigQuery integration, offering full support for DataFrames, as well as a Python API for data analysis and building machine learning (ML) workflows.
“DataFrames is a way of talking about your data in a way that is business sensitive and business appropriate and really simplifies how you process your data,” explained Porter. “By implementing DataFrames in our software, we're fundamentally fitting better into the workflow of the software engineers at the company, not just the data analytics engineers and the analysts.”
The combination of dbt and BigQuery supercharges data quality and trust, which serves as the foundation for successful AI, according to dbt Labs. This is further amplified by dbt Copilot—an AI-powered data assistant in dbt Cloud—which is now generally available. The dbt Copilot, through its ability to automate routine tasks and persist Analytics Development Lifecycle (ADLC) best practices via natural language queries, enables BigQuery users to build their pipelines with more accuracy and more efficiency.
dbt Copilot is a “very interesting balance between giving more people access to the warehouse in a way that is natural for them and letting the data team still have control over their company's most valuable assets—which is how their data is processed, both efficiently and conforming to all of their compliance requirements,” Porter noted.
Ultimately, according to Brandon Sweeney, president and chief operating officer at dbt Labs, "We are excited to launch our partnership with Google Cloud to expand customer access to dbt Cloud, enable our customers to deploy how and where they want to manage their data estates, and continue to deliver a world class experience for current and future joint customers. As the standard for AI on structured data, dbt is helping teams boost data quality while shipping trusted data faster. Together, we can empower more teams to embrace the Analytics Development Lifecycle (ADLC)."
To learn more about dbt Cloud on Google Cloud, please visit https://www.getdbt.com/.