Google's internal Spanner system
Google's internal Spanner system is a globally distributed, externally consistent, and highly available database that horizontally scales across continents and provides strong transactional semantics. It combines the scalability of NoSQL systems with the ACID properties of traditional relational…
Key facts
- First appeared
- 2008
- Category
- technology
- Problem solved
- Spanner was created to address the immense challenge of maintaining strong transactional consistency (ACID properties) across a globally distributed database while simultaneously achieving high availability and massive horizontal scalability. Prior systems either offered strong consistency locally but struggled to scale globally without significant application-level complexity for consistency management, or provided global scale with only eventual consistency (like many NoSQL databases), which was insufficient for Google's critical services requiring strict data integrity.
- Platforms
- Google's proprietary internal infrastructure, Google Cloud Platform
Related technologies
Notable users
- Google (for services like AdWords, Gmail, YouTube, Google Maps, Google Play)
- Various Google Cloud Platform customers (including financial services, gaming, retail)