Internal Development & TrueTime Deployment

Google successfully deployed TrueTime, its custom hardware-assisted synchronized clock system, across its global data centers. This infrastructure was critical for Spanner's ability to provide globally consistent transactions.

Significance

TrueTime was the foundational technological breakthrough that enabled Spanner to achieve external consistency and global ACID transactions, effectively circumventing traditional CAP theorem limitations.

Key facts

Year
2007
Type
invention
Location
Google data centers globally