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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

#301

Post by nickjackson »

bdarnell wrote: post #189
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…

(Cockroach Labs CTO here) Google launching Spanner is generally a positive thing for our industry and our product. It's more proof that what we're aiming for is possible and that there's demand for it. We expect that in five years, all tech companies will be deploying technology like ours. One of the big differences is that Spanner only uses SQL for read-only operations, with a custom API for writes. We use standard…

I for one would love to see a hosted offering of cockroachdb!

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#302

Post by jplahn »

user5994461 wrote: post #254
aanm1988 wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google: Had to make all their core technologies efficient, performant, scalable and maintainable or they couldn't sustain their business. Which Amazon totally didn't have to do with their firehose of cash?

Google has to support Google, Youtube and many of the most resources intensive services in existence on Earth. They needed to be "efficient enough" to operate that, meaning incredibly efficient. Amazon runs nothing, it's an outsourcing firm. They needed to make services "good enough" to be sold. If a service is somewhat inefficient, it just charges the clients more to cover the costs. Technologies reflect the busines…

You do realize the way most services get into AWS is that they're first built in the retail side of Amazon (without any thought towards AWS) and then once people realize it's effectively solving an actual problem, it's rebuilt for AWS. Having to support Amazon retail is a pretty demanding stress test -- I'm not sure why you're getting this notion that Amazon doesn't run anything. I should think handling Black Friday alone would count for something..

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#303

Post by threeseed »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #253
cobookman wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Aurora powers huge websites, spanner is for ginormous websites. Think a multiplier to netflix's database needs.

Curious to know what are Netflix's needs for relational database? Doesn't strike me as a business with complex logic.

Netflix mainly uses Cassandra as their database.

And their needs are reasonably complex. They use machine learning and big data analytics to generate the list of videos that you should be watching. In order for those to work they need to capture a whole raft of end user metrics e.g. at what point you paused video X.

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#304

Post by justinhj »

hosh wrote: post #187
mistermann wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I write software as a developer. This is how I earn my livelihood. Four years ago, I determined that while development work might seem to be near the top of the food chain, there will at some point where my work will be replaced by AIs. This is not so different from how word processors replaced the specialist job of typesetters. Word processors make "good enough" typesetting. You can still find typesetters practicing…

Anything that you can easily specify and describe in detail can be automated. In practise the world is filled with computers that need programming to cope with ever changing chaotic actions of our users. Personally I'm long on software developers, despite being very excited by how AI has blown up lately.

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#305

Post by arjunnarayan »

rgrove wrote: post #292
evanweaver wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The serverless cloud is pay-as-you-go. There is no minimum spend, unlike Spanner's $1000 per month (apparently). And it's cheaper than operating any open source on cloud hardware. On-premises is licensed by core. We have a developer edition you can use on your local machine, but we don't currently have plans to open source FaunaDB itself.

Where did you read that Cloud Spanner has a $1,000 per month minimum spend? I can't seem to find any mention of this.

Minimum 3 nodes * node pricing of $.90/hour = 30.924*30 = 1944/month.

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#307

Post by inssein »

tedd4u wrote: post #33

The team here at Quizlet did a lot of performance testing on Spanner with one of our MySQL workloads to see if it's an option for us. Here are the test results: https://quizlet.com/blog/quizlet-cloud-spanner

Quickly skimmed this.. how is comparing Cloud Spanner to a VM running MySQL comparable?

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#308

Post by _bpo »

010a wrote: post #198
scarmig wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Capital expenditures might shed some light on this. I don't think there's enough public data to be clear but in 2015 Amazon (4.8B), Google (9.9B) and Microsoft (5.9B) were at least on the same order of magnitude in terms of CapEx, whereas other major "datacenter" companies like Rackspace (475M) are much smaller.

I don't think you can draw any definitive conclusions from this, but calling it a class of size 1 or 2 is probably an overstatement of Google (+/- Amazon)'s advantage over Microsoft at least.

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#309

Post by daenney »

ex3ndr wrote: post #287
daenney wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that comparison holds. It's easy to push 50k+ on a single node, you're basically only resource bound on that machine. Pushing 20k+ on something that's globally consistent spread out over so many instances is a different exercise entirely. It also depends on the level of consistency you're asking from Cassandra. You'd probably need to set this to EACH_QUORUM or ALL to mimic the behaviour Spanner gives yo…

Sure, but you can make geo-replication and even implement proxy for providing consistency across DC, sure it won't be that fast in terms of latency, but throughput will be the same.

How does this proxy that provides cross-DC consistency work? And how does it guarantee that you'll get globally consistent reads?

Most cases I've seen latency can affect throughput plenty so I doubt your assertion that it won't affect throughput quite a bit. Even more so for anything that relies on TCP/IP.

I'd highly recommend reading the Bigtable[0] and Spanner[1] papers first and maybe then we can have a sensible and fruitful argument.

[0]: https://research.google.com/archive/bigtable.html

[1]: https://research.google.com/archive/spanner.html

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#310

Post by sah2ed »

aaronblohowiak wrote: post #181
mistermann wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Microsoft has a history of sales and support that will allow them a certain longevity. They also have less "brand hate" than Oracle. I dont think MSSQL is going to be like Sybase any time soon, but I probably wouldn't focus on that stack starting now if you are into the startup or california scene. For many places in the USA, MS is the way to go. EDIT: Also, most DB users don't need global-scale databases.

> ... but I probably wouldn't focus on that stack starting now if you are into the startup or california scene.

That is not necessarily a foregone conclusion. In tandem with their marketing of Azure, MS is pushing SQL Server on Linux heavily [0].

"SQL Server is Windows-only" is no longer a valid argument to choose another RDBMS if a startup uses lots of MS tooling but deploy on Linux servers.

[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server/sql-server-vnext-...

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