Cloud Spanner

Google Cloud Spanner is a globally distributed, strongly consistent, relational database service offered by Google Cloud. It uniquely combines the ACID transactional guarantees and SQL interface of traditional enterprise relational databases with the horizontal scalability and high availability…

Key facts

First appeared
2017
Category
technology
Problem solved
Cloud Spanner was created to solve the challenge of building globally distributed applications that require strong transactional consistency, high availability, and massive horizontal scalability. Prior to Spanner, developers faced a stark choice: use traditional relational databases that offered strong consistency but struggled to scale globally, or opt for NoSQL databases that scaled easily but often sacrificed strong consistency and transactional guarantees, forcing complex consistency logic into application code.
Platforms
Google Cloud Platform

Related technologies

Notable users

  • Yahoo Japan
  • SAP
  • Google (internal services like Google Ads, Gmail, YouTube, Google Cloud Billing)
  • Square Enix (gaming)
  • Snap (Snapchat)
  • Niantic (Pokémon GO)
  • Coinbase
  • LVMH
  • Palo Alto Networks