Cloud Spanner is a fully managed relational database service offering high availability and strong consistency without compromising latency. Google has been working on a globally distributed database called Spanner for quite some time. It has recently released the service to the outside world as Cloud Spanner. You can scale your database instance from one to thousands of nodes across the globe without worrying about data consistency. By levering TrueTime, a highly available and distributed clock, Cloud Spanner provides strong consistency for reads and snapshots. You can use standard SQL to read data from Cloud Spanner, but for write operations you have to use their RPC API. Although not all services would require a global-scale distributed database, the general availability of Cloud Spanner is a big shift in the way we think about databases. And its design is influencing open source products such as CockroachDB.
Cloud Spanner is a fully managed relational database service offering high availability and strong consistency without compromising latency. Google has been working on a globally distributed database called Spanner for quite some time. It has recently released the service to the outside world as Cloud Spanner. You can scale your database instance from one to thousands of nodes across the globe without worrying about data consistency. By levering TrueTime, a highly available and distributed clock, Cloud Spanner provides strong consistency for reads and snapshots. You can use standard SQL to read data from Cloud Spanner, but for write operations you have to use their RPC API. Although not all services would require a global-scale distributed database, the general availability of Cloud Spanner is a big shift in the way we think about databases. And its design is influencing open source products such as CockroachDB.
