Google announced a number of updates to its cloud-based database services today. For the most part, we're not talking about any groundbreaking new products here but all of these updates address specific pain points that enterprises suffer when they move to the cloud.  

As Google Director of Product Management Dominic Preuss told me ahead of today’s announcements, Google long saw itself as a thought leader in the database space. For the longest time, though, that thought leadership was all about things like the Bigtable paper and didn’t really manifest itself in the form of products. Projects like the globally distributed Cloud Spanner database are now allowing Google Cloud to put its stamp on this market.  

Preuss also noted that many of Google’s enterprise users often start with lifting and shifting their existing workloads to the cloud. Once they have done that, though, they are also looking to launch new applications in the cloud — and at that point, they typically want managed services that free them from having to do the grunt work of managing their own infrastructure.