Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I will say that it does show a vote of confidence to say that Photos, Gmail and Ads use GCP infra, I'm not sure? I guess I'm mostly not sure what "gcp infra" means there. The blog post says "Spanner is used ubiquitously inside of Google, supporting services such as; Ads, Gmail and Photos." But there's google-internal spanner, and gcp spanner. A service using spanner at Google isn't necessarily using gcp. (No clue a…
Surely in a post about Google Cloud Spanner, all examples mentioned use Google Cloud Spanner? It would be moot listing them as examples if they would not: so my assumption is they are all using GCP infra already for Spanner. I really want to give Google the benefit of the doubt: but it doesn't help that they did not write that eg Gmail is using "Cloud Spanner." They wrote that it uses Spanner.
Apparently Cloud Spanner doesn't support protobuf columns? It would be hard for any internal Google product to use it under that restriction.