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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

#81

Post by mikeyouse »

jrowley wrote: post #72
api wrote: post #31

Given the CAP theorem I wonder what trade-offs they make and how much visibility they give you into these trade-offs. In any case this is much better than Amazon's offerings... when they actually ship it. :)

Check out this post mentioned in the original post: https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2017/02/inside-Cloud-Sp... Of note: They say Spanner is "both consistent and highly available despite operating over a wide area". So not 100% availability but they've got it to "more than five 9s of availability (less than one failure in 1066)."

I didn't pick up on it until just a moment ago, but when you say "They say", it's actually Eric Brewer saying that -- who's most known for coming up with the CAP theorem. I think they've got a pretty good understanding of it!

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#82

Post by karmakaze »

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

> Not every application can handle Spanner's ~5ms minimum query time, but if you can, then you can have that latency for a very high-throughput workload

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#83

Post by foolfoolz »

runeks wrote: post #27

I wonder why they charge a minimum of $0.90 per node-hour when they offer VMs for as little as $0.008/hr. This is hugely useful even for single-person startups, so why charge a minimum of ~$8,000 per year?

because if you aren't spending 8k/yr on your database then you don't need this level of scale

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#84

Post by ryeguy »

rattray wrote: post #80

Very interesting. How does this pricing compare to AWS Aurora? https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/pricing/

It's not fair to compare these since Aurora is a traditional relational database. It does not have a horizontal scalability solution aside from read replicas.

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#85

Post by elvinyung »

xapata wrote: post #79

Amazon likes to respond to Google with it's own price drops and product launches. It's telling that their announcements are orthogonal instead of direct competition with Spanner. When Google announced Spanner back in 2012, I'm sure Amazon and Microsoft started teams to reproduce their own versions. Spanner is not just software. The private network reduces partitions. GPS and atomic clocks for every machine help synch…

Amazon already has Aurora: https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/details/

You're right that there's literally nothing else out there that has tight synchronization using atomic clocks, though.

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#86

Post by tedd4u »

rattray wrote: post #80

Very interesting. How does this pricing compare to AWS Aurora? https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/pricing/

Not sure. If you need to scale beyond a single master, Aurora won't help in the same way Spanner does though. You can dial up the number of nodes in Spanner dynamically under load with good results.

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#87

Post by suprgeek »

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 connecting it to the private global network, thus ensuring path diversity for every pair of data centers. Similarly, there is redundancy of equipment and paths within a datacenter. Thus normally catastrophic events, such as cut fiber lines, do not lead to partitions or to outages."

2) Ninja 2PC

"Spanner uses two-phase commit (2PC) and strict two-phase locking to ensure isolation and strong consistency. 2PC has been called the “anti-availability” protocol [Hel16] because all members must be up for it to work. Spanner mitigates this by having each member be a Paxos group, thus ensuring each 2PC “member” is highly available even if some of its Paxos participants are down."

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#88

Post by AsyncAwait »

gigatexal wrote: post #26
elvinyung wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Strong consistency isn't mutually exclusive with scalability. Google has written about it at length[1][2][3]. Furthermore, there are already more than a few attempts underway to build scalable relational databases ("NewSQL") outside Google.[4] 1: https://research.google.com/pubs/pub36971.html 2: https://research.google.com/archive/spanner.html 3: http://datascienceassn.org/sites/default/files/F1%20A%20Dist... 4:…

First time I'm hearing about newSQL thanks for these links.

You may be interested in CockroachDB[1] and TIDB[2], which are open-source newSQL databases inspired by Spanner and F1.

1 - https://www.cockroachlabs.com 2 - https://github.com/pingcap/tidb

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#89

Post by ChuckMcM »

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 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!

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#90

Post by rdtsc »

halflings wrote: post #77
rdtsc wrote: post #75

> This leads to three kinds of systems: CA, CP and AP, What is a distributed system that is CA? Can you build a distributed system which will never have a partition.

They answer your question just two lines under the one you are quoting: > For distributed systems over a “wide area,” it's generally viewed that partitions are inevitable, although not necessarily common. If you believe that partitions are inevitable, any distributed system must be prepared to forfeit either consistency (AP) or availability (CP), which is not a choice anyone wants to make. In fact, the original point…

> If you believe that partitions are inevitable, any distributed system

How does that answer it? Are they implying that partitions will not happen if you don't believe in them?

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