I'm very excited that Google announced Cloud Bigtable. You get a managed instance of Bigtable with an open-source API (there's an HBase client) at a great price! Bigtable's HBase APIs are fairly simple and easy to use, and we seem to have mapped nearly all of the features in the client to Bigtable.
Combined with Google Cloud Dataflow, which lets you write Flume jobs over your data for analytics, I think Google's Cloud Platform is very compelling for data intensive applications. I'm a huge fan of Flume, and am absolutely convinced it provides a huge boost to developer productivity compared to writing direct mapreduces. I think the platform finally has all the pieces needed for big data applications far quicker than rolling-your-own Hadoop+Mapreduce+HBase+Hive/Pig/Scalding stack in the cloud. I'm excited to see how developers will use this platform.
