Google today announced that Cloud Spanner, its globally distributed relational database service, is now generally available after what was a relatively short..
Google today announced that Cloud Spanner, its globally distributed relational database service, is now generally available after what was a relatively short four-month beta period.
When it launched, Google positioned the service as an alternative for businesses that were about to outgrow their existing relational databases. “ If you are struggling with the scale of your transactional database — you will go to a sharded database, or NoSQL, ” Google’s Deepti Srivastava said. “ If y ou’ re at that stage where you have to make those trade-offs, Spanner is the way to go. You are already doing work to use one of those systems. We try to make that trade-off as simple as possible.”
Now that it is generally available, Google promises its users a 99.999 percent availability and strong consistency. “As a combined software/hardware solution that includes atomic clocks and GPS receivers across Google’s global network, Cloud Spanner also offers additional accuracy, reliability and performance in the form of a fully-managed cloud database service, ” Google claims in its blog post today.
The GA of Cloud Spanner comes less than a week after Microsoft announced its Cosmos DB service, which features many of the same advantages of Cloud Spanner but with the added benefits of a wider range of consistency models. While Cosmos DB only promises 99.99 percent uptime, Microsoft’s service also offers the same guarantee for throughput, latency and consistency.
