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Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

cloudplatform.googleblog.com

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Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#191

Post by jpmattia »

suprgeek wrote: post #87

Really a CP system but with the Availability being five 9s or better (less than one failure in 10^6) How: 1)Hardware - Gobs and Gobs of Hardware and SRE experience "Spanner is not running over the public Internet — in fact, every Spanner packet flows only over Google-controlled routers and links (excluding any edge links to remote clients). Furthermore, each data center typically has at least three independent fibers…

> with the Availability being five 9s or better (less than one failure in 10^6)

Anyone know how exactly this is defined for them? (Time? Queries? Results?)

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#192

Post by amalag »

mistermann wrote: post #177
kornish wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It will be interesting if Amazon and Microsoft choose to compete with Google on this service. If we get to the point where you have databases, compute, storage, and connectivity services from those three at equal scale, well that would be a lot of choice for the developers! There are also plenty of choices evolving for developers who aren't looking for hosted solutions (which can sometimes be a showstopper for ente…

As someone who works (in part) in the MS SQL field, is it irrational to be a bit worried about the effects some of these platform advances might have one one's career? For example, being a MSSQL performance tuning expert requires years of experience and probably pays very well, but just the other day I read an anecdotal story where someone switched a large BI database to use columnar indexes, allowing them to replace…

People are abusing databases like MSSQL to do things they may not be not good at. Large scale analytics is an example where databases like Infobright give amazing performance.

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#193

Post by theptip »

> Does this mean that Spanner is a CA system as defined by CAP? The short answer is “no” technically, but “yes” in effect and its users can and do assume CA.

It's somewhat ironic that Brewer, the original author of the CAP theorem, is making this sort of marketing-led bending of the CAP theorem terminology. I think what he really should be saying is something in more nuanced language like this: https://martin.kleppmann.com/2015/05/11/please-stop-calling-...

But perhaps Google's marketing department needed something in the more popular "CP or AP?" terminology. I don't see what would be wrong with "CP with extremely high availability" though.

It's certainly wacky to be claiming that a system is "CA", since as the post admits it's technically false; to me this makes it clear that CP vs. AP (vs. CA now?) does not convey enough information. I'd prefer "a linearizably-consistent data store, with ACID semantics, with a 99.999% uptime SLA". Not as snappy as "CA" (I will never have a career in marketing I suppose), but it makes the technical claims more clear.

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#194

Post by amalag »

jchrisa wrote: post #123
ChuckMcM wrote: post #89

Congratulations to the Spanner team for becoming part of the Google public cloud! And for those wondering, this is why Oracle wants billions of dollars from Google for "Java Copyright Infringement" because the only growth market for Oracle right now is their hosted database service, and whoops Google has a better one now. It will be interesting if Amazon and Microsoft choose to compete with Google on this service. If…

As a bit of a veteran in the database industry, I concur (at least about the impact on Oracle's database business). There is a lot of pent-up demand for anything that offers distributed consistency. We've been seeing this demand at Fauna. FaunaDB offers distributed consistency, based on Raft and the Calvin protocol instead of depending on specific networking and clock hardware. We've seen a big part of our appeal is…

What is the monetisation plan? Purely SAAS with on-premise or an open source version with support like postgres/mysql?

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#195

Post by boulos »

sandGorgon wrote: post #172

> If you have a MySQL or PostgreSQL system that's bursting at the seams Postgresql ? How does this work for people migrating from traditional SQL databases - typically people use ORM. How would this fit in with, say , Rails or SqlAlchemy ?

There is JDBC support, so if you're willing and able to connect that way, you could hope for an easier migration. Any move from one database to another is a migration, even if only to deal with dialect-specific things.

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud (but not Spanner).

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#196

Post by macintux »

edaemon wrote: post #141
abalone wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if I'm understanding you, with Aurora all writes go to one master and you're constrained by the biggest instance AWS offers. Is that right? Do you have a sense of what that limit is? There's a pretty big price difference between Spanner and Aurora at the entry level so it's useful to explore this.

Yes, Aurora has a single write master, though it does have automatic write failover -- i.e. if the Aurora primary dies, one of your read replicas is promoted to the primary and reads/writes are directed to the new instance. That does constrain your primary's capabilities to the largest instance size (currently a db.r3.8xlarge). I don't have a good idea what the upper limit is for an Aurora database setup.

How does Aurora know that the primary is dead? Automatic failover is problematic in a distributed system.

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#197

Post by user5994461 »

jedberg wrote: post #110

This release shows the different philosophies of Google vs Amazon in an interesting way. Google prefers building advanced systems that let you do things "the old way" but making them horizontally scalable. Amazon prefers to acknowledge that network partitions exist and try to get you to do things "the new way" that deals with that failure case in the software instead of trying to hide it. I'm not saying either system…

Amazon: Create usual services and sell them.

Google: Make unique products that push the boundaries of what was previously thought possible.

Amazon: Don't care about inefficiencies and usage. Inefficiencies can be handled by charging more to the clients, usage doesn't matter because the users are mostly the clients and they don't feel their pain.

Google: Had to make all their core technologies efficient, performant, scalable and maintainable or they couldn't sustain their business.

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#198

Post by 010a »

scarmig wrote: post #128
tazjin wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main sales pitch of Cloud Spanner is Google's network infrastructure. No startup will be able to replicate that anytime soon, a lot of time (and money) has been put into it by a lot of people over a long time.

Curious: is there any company in the world that could replicate its breadth, performance, and reliability in the next decade? Could any government? Has any government? My impression is that, infrastructure wise, Google is genuinely in a class of size one.

Its probably a class size of 2, with Amazon. Beyond those two though, no one else is close.

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#199

Post by awj »

abalone wrote: post #124
tedd4u wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aurora is very cool but won't help you much after you vertically scale your master and still need more write capacity. With Cloud Spanner you get horizontal write scalability out of the box. Critical difference.

So if I'm understanding you, with Aurora all writes go to one master and you're constrained by the biggest instance AWS offers. Is that right? Do you have a sense of what that limit is? There's a pretty big price difference between Spanner and Aurora at the entry level so it's useful to explore this.

> Do you have a sense of what that limit is?

Per their pricing page[1] it looks like the largest instance available is a "db.r3.8xlarge", which is a special naming of the "r3.8xlarge" instance type[2] which is 32 cpus and 244gb of memory.

That's a hell of a lot of capacity to exhaust, especially if you're using read replicas to reduce it to only/mostly write workloads. Obviously it's possible to use more than this, but the "sheer scale" argument is a bit of a flat one.

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/pricing/ [2] https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/#r3

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#200

Post by 010a »

karlding wrote: post #47

I wonder how this will affect adoption of CockroachDB [1], which was inspired by Spanner and supposedly an open source equivalent. I'd imagine that Spanner is a rather compelling choice, since they don't have to host it themselves. As far as I know, CockroachDB currently does not support providing CockroachDB as a service (but it is on their roadmap) [2]. [1] https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/frequently-asked-questi…

Given that Spanner starts at $650/mo/node + storage costs, I think Cockroach could still see huge usage as a self-hosted alternative.
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