A Cloud Bigtable table is sharded into blocks of contiguous rows, called tablets, to help balance the workload of queries. Tablets are stored on Colossus, Google's file system, in SSTable format. Each tablet is associated with a specific Cloud Bigtable node.
Data is never stored in Cloud Bigtable nodes themselves; each node has pointers to a set of tablets that are stored on Colossus. As a result:
Rebalancing tablets from one node to another is very fast, because the actual data is not copied. Cloud Bigtable simply updates the pointers for each node.
Recovery from the failure of a Cloud Bigtable node is very fast, because only metadata needs to be migrated to the replacement node.
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