Google has made a long-anticipated move with the beta launch of Cloud Spanner, its globally distributed relational database that has powered many of its mega-scale consumer services for years. Here are the key details from Google's announcement:
When building cloud applications, database administrators and developers have been forced to choose between traditional databases that guarantee transactional consistency, or NoSQL databases that offer simple, horizontal scaling and data distribution. Cloud Spanner breaks that dichotomy, offering both of these critical capabilities in a single, fully managed service.
Cloud Spanner keeps application development simple by supporting standard tools and languages in a familiar relational database environment. It’s ideal for operational workloads supported by traditional relational databases, including inventory management, financial transactions and control systems, that are outgrowing those systems.
With Cloud Spanner, your database scales up and down as needed, and you'll only pay for what you use. It features a simple pricing model that charges for compute node-hours, actual storage consumption (no pre-provisioning) and external network access.
For regional deployments, Spanner costs $0.90 per node per hour, with $0.30 per GB of storage per month. There are also charges for network egress. Multi-region pricing will be released soon.
One early customer kicking Spanner's tires is supply-chain software vendor JDA, which sees Spanner as ideal for handling massive amounts of IoT data while providing high availability.
While a newly released service, it seems safe to say Spanner has already been battle-tested at the highest levels. Internally at Google, it handles tens of millions of queries each second, and powers the likes of AdWords.
Google has come up with simple and elastic pricing for Spanner and there are clear use cases for it, says Constellation Reseach VP and principal analyst Doug Henschen. "Spanner uniquely delivers global scalability with consistency for demanding financial services, advertising, retail and supply chain applications requiring synchronous replication," he says. "If there’s one weakness, it’s that Cloud Spanner does not support complicated ormultiple simultaneous reads and writes within single transactions. Still, it uniquely offers the always-available traits of scalable NoSQL options such as Cassandra but with the strong consistency of traditional relational databases."
It's worth noting that Spanner is the inspiration for CockroachDB, an open-source database being developed by a number of former Google employees. CockroachDB is still in beta but the startup has been working on version one for a few years now. Its not clear how CockroachDB will fare against Cloud Spanner, given the engineering and marketing resources Google can bring to bear, but the presence of an open-source alternative is a welcome one and could see parent company Cockroach Labs become a tantalizing acquisition target for Google's competitors in cloud infrastructure.