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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

#441

Post by jsudhams »

computerex wrote: post #355
throwawaydbfif wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The movement from ownership to renting on the web is absolutely terrifying to me. Within the span of a few years we've gone from owning our technology to renting it out from a big players for monthly fees that we cannot completely predict or control. The advantages of owning your own hardware will never go away, but soon this will be made quite intentionally impossible as the big players coalesce and continue buildin…

> One day running your own servers will be like running your own ISP . Massively impractical because the free market has been manipulated to the point that it effectively no longer exists What? People use cloud computing because it already is massively impractical to run your own servers . Hardware is hard to run and scale on your own and experiences economies of scale. This principle is seen everywhere and can hardl…

"Even if you had the state of the art microservice architecture running on a kubernetes cluster on your own hardware, you still wouldn't be able to source disk/CPU fast enough if your service happens to experience loads beyond what you provisioned." That basically means you never planned. As everyone moves to cloud what makes you think AWS, Azure wont have same issue. If entire region is down do you think other regions can handle the load. If you think so you're kidding yourself. Unless you have business where you dont know your peak number then cloud does not matter.

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#442

Post by euyyn »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #433
euyyn wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's like being sad about the emergence of banks, because everybody's money is being kept in a small number of vaults instead of under each one's mattress.

That strategy resulted in the Great Depression and later 2008 crises. Damage was so high that country had to be rescued by the federal government. So, banking is a decent example of how such consolidation into private hands can go wrong. Now we just apply that to IT services and data.

That's a ridiculous argument: Banks started being a thing at the end of the Middle Ages. The Great Depression and the Great Recession were not caused by banks emerging, nor by people putting their savings in them.

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#443

Post by nickpsecurity »

euyyn wrote: post #442
nickpsecurity wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That strategy resulted in the Great Depression and later 2008 crises. Damage was so high that country had to be rescued by the federal government. So, banking is a decent example of how such consolidation into private hands can go wrong. Now we just apply that to IT services and data.

That's a ridiculous argument: Banks started being a thing at the end of the Middle Ages. The Great Depression and the Great Recession were not caused by banks emerging, nor by people putting their savings in them.

Not emerging. Just being themselves with all their schemes and an economy dependent on them. A distrust of banks and their schemes at a national level might have reduced their ability to cause those problems. On top of the smaller stuff such as them delaying deposits or withdrawing stuff for bogus reasons.

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#444

Post by detaro »

stuckagain wrote: post #430
detaro wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, they clearly say that they use atomic clocks in addition, but that's commercially available as well. Atomic clock for frequency stability short- to mid-term, GPS to keep it synced to global time. E.g. in many cases, mobile-phone base stations contain just such a setup, and the data-center versions should fit in a few HE.

And then all you need is a team of 12 full time SREs to manage it.

A system build on top of it? Possibly, but thats the trade-off if you don't want to pay for/be lock-in to somebody else running it. For just the timing stuff: not really. Of course it adds complexity, but these things are established and should be quite stable.

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#445

Post by computerex »

jsudhams wrote: post #441
computerex wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One day running your own servers will be like running your own ISP . Massively impractical because the free market has been manipulated to the point that it effectively no longer exists What? People use cloud computing because it already is massively impractical to run your own servers . Hardware is hard to run and scale on your own and experiences economies of scale. This principle is seen everywhere and can hardl…

"Even if you had the state of the art microservice architecture running on a kubernetes cluster on your own hardware, you still wouldn't be able to source disk/CPU fast enough if your service happens to experience loads beyond what you provisioned." That basically means you never planned. As everyone moves to cloud what makes you think AWS, Azure wont have same issue. If entire region is down do you think other regio…

You can plan all you'd like, failures happen not necessarily due to poor planning but because in real life, shit happens. Pokemon Go for instance experienced like 50x the amount of traffic they planned for.

Secondly, software companies like Microsoft, Google and IBM might know a thing or two about running data centers. Due to economies of scale, these companies are inherently in a better position to supply hardware at scale.

> If entire region is down do you think other regions can handle the load. If you think so you're kidding yourself

Netflix routinely does just this to test the resilience of their systems. They pick a random AWS region, and they evacuate it. All the traffic is proxied to the other regions and eventually via DNS the traffic is routed entirely to the surviving regions. No interruption of service is experienced by the users.

Here's a visualization of Netflix simulating a failure on the US-east-1 region and failing over to US-west-1/US-west-2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVbTjlZ0sfE

The top right node is the one that fails. As the error rate climbs, traffic starts getting proxied over to the surviving nodes, until a DNS switch redirects all traffic to the surviving nodes. Netflix does this monthly, in production. They also run https://github.com/Netflix/SimianArmy on production.

The cloud enables fault tolerance, resiliency and graceful degradation.

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#446

Post by computerex »

throwawaydbfif wrote: post #361
computerex wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One day running your own servers will be like running your own ISP . Massively impractical because the free market has been manipulated to the point that it effectively no longer exists What? People use cloud computing because it already is massively impractical to run your own servers . Hardware is hard to run and scale on your own and experiences economies of scale. This principle is seen everywhere and can hardl…

Have you run your own servers in a colo? I've done it myself. One person, with maybe 3 hours a week of time investment after a few weeks of setup and hardware purchase. Using containers I can move between the cloud and my own servers seamlessly, and long as I never bite the golden apple and use any of the cloud's walled garden "services" like S3. If I need more power I can spin up some temporary servers at any cloud…

To be honest, you sound like conspiracy nut hell bent on hating the Cloud. Maybe you should try taking a deep breath, and try to open up to the possibility that the Cloud is actually a good thing, and Cloud providers aren't the illuminati trying to "lock you in". Well maybe they are. Of course every cloud provider wants you to use their services.

But any "lock in" is totally up to you. Take a look at this: https://kubernetes.io/

You can architect your system in a way that it'll run on any cloud provider. All the major Cloud Providers support kube for orchestration.

To be honest I don't think you know what you're talking about. You should refrain from making uninformed opinions on hacker news, especially on a throwaway.

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#447

Post by takeda »

parasubvert wrote: post #420
the_cap_theorem wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See my other comment in this thread on how they still used misleading language in their marketing, regardless of who the author is. Don't fall for these PR tricks. Hiring thought leaders/influencers is one that should be easy to spot. Best to judge claims on their own merit and not by the person that speaks them....

What am I supposed to think about someone who creates a throwaway account called "the_cap_theorem"? You look like a competitor that's freaking out and throwing FUD. I don't think Eric's words were misleading. People will judge Cloud Spanner on its own merit, but given the reputation Eric has both academically and professionally, I think Cloud Spanner is deserving of attention, and is not a "PR trick".

I don't care who Eric is, it is still misleading. He knows he is providing misinformation and he tries to cover his a__ by adding that technically it is a CP system, when a partition happens. And that's what matters.

Saying it is CA because Google threw some money to reduce chances of a partition happening is very misleading. By that definition you could take any RDBMS and claim that is CA because with enough money you can make sure hardware won't fail. It defeats the purpose what CAP is being used for, which is telling us how the system will behave when partition does happen. It defeats the purpose what Aphyr was doing with his Jepsen tests which observe how given storage solution behave when there's a network partition.

The claim that Eric Brewer wrote regarding Spanner reduces makes him lose him credibility to me at least. It almost feels like he was hired by Google, just so he could claim that.

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#448

Post by parasubvert »

takeda wrote: post #447
parasubvert wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What am I supposed to think about someone who creates a throwaway account called "the_cap_theorem"? You look like a competitor that's freaking out and throwing FUD. I don't think Eric's words were misleading. People will judge Cloud Spanner on its own merit, but given the reputation Eric has both academically and professionally, I think Cloud Spanner is deserving of attention, and is not a "PR trick".

I don't care who Eric is, it is still misleading. He knows he is providing misinformation and he tries to cover his a__ by adding that technically it is a CP system, when a partition happens. And that's what matters. Saying it is CA because Google threw some money to reduce chances of a partition happening is very misleading. By that definition you could take any RDBMS and claim that is CA because with enough money y…

I think you've somewhere lost the plot of what Google has achieved here, and in no way does it detract from running Spanner against Jepsen.

Google is claiming they've built a geographically distributed CP system with linearizability and 99.999% global availability. They haven't defeated CAP because A is about total availability in the face of network failures. But for most practical purposes they've achieved exactly what most people want in their database. Consistent and mostly available except perhaps 30 seconds a year. That is why it is completely acceptable for Eric to say this is a "effectively" a CA system.

Eric was hired to help BUILD this, not market it.

Aphyr also has no issues with Eric's comments (read Twitter) - Spanner a CP system with better latency due to the use of TrueTime.

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#449

Post by hueving »

computerex wrote: post #445
jsudhams wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Even if you had the state of the art microservice architecture running on a kubernetes cluster on your own hardware, you still wouldn't be able to source disk/CPU fast enough if your service happens to experience loads beyond what you provisioned." That basically means you never planned. As everyone moves to cloud what makes you think AWS, Azure wont have same issue. If entire region is down do you think other regio…

You can plan all you'd like, failures happen not necessarily due to poor planning but because in real life, shit happens . Pokemon Go for instance experienced like 50x the amount of traffic they planned for. Secondly, software companies like Microsoft, Google and IBM might know a thing or two about running data centers. Due to economies of scale , these companies are inherently in a better position to supply hardware…

I think you missed the point, Netflix evacuating a region is not the same thing as that region failing. If the whole region goes down, their (AWS's) total capacity just took a major hit and unless they have obscenely over-provisioned (they haven't), shit is going to hit the fan when people start spinning up stuff in the remaining regions to make up for the loss.

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#450

Post by hueving »

computerex wrote: post #445
jsudhams wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Even if you had the state of the art microservice architecture running on a kubernetes cluster on your own hardware, you still wouldn't be able to source disk/CPU fast enough if your service happens to experience loads beyond what you provisioned." That basically means you never planned. As everyone moves to cloud what makes you think AWS, Azure wont have same issue. If entire region is down do you think other regio…

You can plan all you'd like, failures happen not necessarily due to poor planning but because in real life, shit happens . Pokemon Go for instance experienced like 50x the amount of traffic they planned for. Secondly, software companies like Microsoft, Google and IBM might know a thing or two about running data centers. Due to economies of scale , these companies are inherently in a better position to supply hardware…

>The cloud enables fault tolerance, resiliency and graceful degradation

No, tooling to failover and spin up new instances does that. An enterprise with 3 data centers can do that.

"the cloud" is just doing it on someone else's hardware.

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