Editor's Update February 22, 2016: The Click to Deploy solution for Crate is no longer available.

Today's guest post comes from Tyler Randles. Tyler is a developer evangelist at Crate, developers of open source distributed SQL database software.

Crate is a distributed open source SQL database built on a high availability, shared-nothing architecture. Crate automatically shards and distributes data across all of the nodes and maintains several replicas for high availability and fault tolerance. This means when a new node is added, the cluster automatically rebalances and can self-heal when a node is removed. All data is indexed, optimized, and compressed on ingest and is accessible using familiar SQL syntax (SELECT * FROM...) through a RESTful API.

Crate was built so developers won’t need to “glue” several technologies together to store documents or BLOBs, or support real-time search. It also helps dev-ops by eliminating the need for manual tuning, sharding, replication, and other operations required to keep a large data store in good health. Companies like ClearVoice and VoIPStudios have been using Crate to increase query performance and simplify their technology stack.

Crate on Google Compute Engine won TechCrunch Disrupt at the end of 2014, and we’ve been working to make it even easier to get a Crate cluster up and running on Compute Engine. Now, we’re happy to announce a click-to-deploy solution that allows you to spin up a Crate cluster in just a few clicks by specifying the cluster size, how much data storage is needed, and what machine type to use. Instances and disks will be automatically provisioned, and Crate will be installed and ready to import data in a few minutes.

If you have more data than a single machine can handle, need resilience, or just want to try a new distributed SQL database, Crate on Google Compute Engine is the perfect place to get started. It’ll help you scale faster, reduce query times, and simplify your technology stack. The new Click to Deploy solution makes it easy for anyone with a Google Cloud Platform account to try out Crate and reduces setup times to just a few minutes. Stay up-to-date with latest news about Crate and Google and let us know what you think.

Try Compute Engine today with a free trial of Google Cloud Platform including $300 in credit to spend over 60 days!