Google Cloud Spanner Database Now Supports Multiple Regions

Google is allowing customers to deploy multi-regional configurations for Google Cloud Spanner – the commercial version of the database that powers the search giant’s AdWords advertising platform.

The service was made generally available in May, promising to eliminate the need for organisations to choose between the scalability of non-relational databases and the familiar structure of relational databases.

“Cloud Spanner is the first and only enterprise-grade, globally distributed and strongly consistent database service built specifically for the cloud that combines the benefits and familiarity of relational database semantics with non-relational scale and performance,” said Deepti Srivastava, Product Manager for Google Spanner.

Cloud Spanner

“For years, developers and IT organizations were forced to make painful compromises between the horizontal scalability of non-relational databases and the transactions, structured schema and complex SQL queries offered by traditional relational databases.

“With the increase in volume, variety and velocity of data, companies had to layer additional technologies and scale-related workarounds to keep up. These compromises introduced immense complexity and only addressed the symptoms of the problem, not the actual problem.

“At Google, Spanner powers apps that process billions of transactions per day across many Google services. In fact, it has become the default database internally for apps of all sizes.”

However until now users have been restricted to a single region. Google said the arrival of multi-region configurations means Cloud Spanner can read and write up-to-date data for applications around the world with minimal latency for end users and survive a regional failure.

Indeed, Google promises a 99.999 percent availability SLA with no planned downtime.

Early adopters include Evernote, Marketo and Redknee, which use Spanner to power their platforms and services.

“It now supports a wider range of application workloads, from a single node in a single region to massive instances that span regions and continents. At any scale, Cloud Spanner behaves the same, delivering a single database experience,” added Srivastava.

“We believe Cloud Spanner is unique among databases and cloud database services, offering a global relational database, not just a feature to eventually copy or replicate data around the world.”

Quiz: Think you know all about the database market?