In this post we want to provide you with a breakdown of the most important changes that are coming with this announcement.
First off, if you are a Looker customer at the moment, nothing will change for you. You still have your instance and it will receive support under the Looker terms of service and the Cloud Data Processing Addendum (CDPA).
With that said, what is Looker (Google Cloud Core)? It is the Looker application, but integrated into the Google Cloud Console.
What does that mean? It will have benefits that the current Google Cloud hosted solution does not offer, to list a few:
New security features, including support for customer-managed encryption keys, private IP access, and the ability to deploy Looker within a VPC-SC perimeter.
Built-in connectivity support that simplifies the connection to BigQuery.
Integration with Google Cloud Identity Access Management (IAM).
Control over instance management and maintenance. Custom URL configuration, and custom analytics and auditing based on log data.
Terraform and gcloud CLI command support
This comes at the expense of the following features, which won’t be available: SAML/LDAP/OpenID SSO, and the Looker mobile application. Also, you won’t be able to get an additional instance. Instead you would have to pay for a whole new Looker Edition.
What else? The introduction of Looker Editions, currently Standard, Enterprise and Embed are available. What stands out here is that the Standard edition will be available as a monthly subscription.
Additionally, you will have easy access to a Looker trial, as you can start a free 30-day trial from your Google Cloud Console.
As for the available regions, ​​Looker (Google Cloud core) is expected to be available in the following regions at launch:
Americas — Iowa — us-central1
Americas — Oregon — us-west1
Netherlands europe-west4
Taiwan asia-east1
With additional regions on the roadmap.
Now, how does the original Looker setup compare to these new Editions:
The last point to mention here is that from 15. September 2023, the sale of current Looker instances hosted on Google Cloud will be discontinued. Should you prefer this hosting solution, the window to get it will close over the next few months. Hosting in AWS and Azure will still be available after this point in time.