Cloud Spanner is the first and only relational database service that is both strongly consistent and horizontally scalable. With Cloud Spanner you enjoy all the traditional benefits of a relational database: ACID transactions, relational schemas (and schema changes without downtime), SQL queries, high performance, and high availability. But unlike any other relational database service, Cloud Spanner scales horizontally, to hundreds or thousands of servers, so it can handle the highest of transactional workloads.

1. Google Cloud Spanner
Meetup 26-2-2017
Vadim Solovey //CTO (vadim@doit-intl.com)

2. DoIT International confidential │ Do not distribute
About us..
Vadim Solovey
CTO

3. DoIT International confidential │ Do not distribute

4. DoIT International confidential │ Do not distribute

5. DoIT International confidential │ Do not distribute

6. SQL?
Strong consistency
Standard Query Language
ACID transactions
Horizontally scalable
Highly available
or No-SQL?

7. Confidential + Proprietary
“NewSQL is a class of modern relational database management systems that seek to
provide the same scalable performance of NoSQL systems for online transaction
processing (OLTP) read-write workloads while still maintaining the ACID guarantees of
a traditional database system. [...] Example systems in this category are Google
Spanner …”
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NewSQL

8. Confidential + Proprietary
It is impossible for a distributed computer system to simultaneously provide more
than two out of three of the following guarantees: Consistency. Availability. Partition
Tolerance.
CAP Theorem

9. “Cloud Spanner is not just software. It is the union of
software, hardware — in the form of atomic clocks in
Google’s data centers — and an incredibly robust network
connecting their data centers together. So it’s not just
writing code. It’s a lot of investment and a lot of operational
expertise that Google excels at.”
Nick Heudecker
Research Director, Gartner

10. With Cloud Spanner you enjoy all the
traditional benefits of a SQL database:
● ACID transactions
● High Availability through synchronous
replication
● Schemas (w/ changes without
downtime),
● SQL Queries
● Scales Horizontally
● Managed by Google SRE team
Cloud Spanner 101

11. Best of Both Relational & NoSQL
Cloud Spanner Traditional Relational Traditional NoSQL
Schema ✓ Yes ✓ Yes X No
SQL ✓ Yes ✓ Yes X No
Consistency ✓ Strong ✓ Strong X Eventual
Availability ✓ High X Failover ✓ High
Scalability ✓ Horizontal X Vertical ✓ Horizontal
Replication ✓ Automatic ↻ Configurable ↻ Configurable

12. Cloud StorageCloud Bigtable
Cloud
Datastore
Cloud SQL
Good for:
Binary or object
data
Such as:
Images, Media
serving, backups
Good for:
Hierarchical,
mobile, web
Such as:
User profiles,
Game State
Good for:
Web
frameworks
Such as:
CMS,
eCommerce
Good for:
Heavy read +
write, events,
Such as:
AdTech,
Financial, IoT
Cloud
Memorystore
Good for:
Web/mobile apps,
gaming
Such as:
Game state, user
sessions
EAP
Cloud
Spanner
Beta
Good for:
RDBMS+scale,
HA, HTAP
Such as:
User metadata,
Ad/Fin/MarTech
BigQuery
Good for:
Enterprise Data
Warehouse
Such as:
Analytics,
Dashboards
In Memory Relational Non-Relational Object Warehouse
Cloud Database Portfolio

13. Pricing
No ops or I/O to provision
Storage auto-scales, no storage provisioning required
Nodes
● $0.90 / hour / node (includes 3 replications)
Storage
● SSD: $0.30 GB / month (includes replication)
Network
● Standard cross-region and Internet egress
● Free: Ingress, egress within region

14. Other solutions on the market
Cloud Spanner Oracle
AWS
Aurora
AWS
DynamoDB
Azure
DocumentDB
MongoDB Cassandra
Type Scale out relational RDBMS RDBMS Key-value Document Document Wide-column
Schema Yes Yes Yes No No No No
SQL Native Native Native No Limited No CQL
Consistency (Default) Strong (global)
Strong
(datacenter)
Strong
(within AZ)
Tunable Tunable Eventual Tunable
Availability
99.99% *
(multi-region: 5 9s)
User
configured
99.99% Unspecified 99.99% Unspecified Unspecified
Data-layer Encryption Yes Yes Within Region Client-side No Not by default Datastax
Scalability Horizontal within DC Vertical Horizontal Horizontal Horizontal Horizontal
Replication
Regional
(multi-region: 2017)
Datacenter Regional Multi-region Multi-region User configured User configured
Managed Service Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
Atlas
3rd Party Cloud
3rd party

15. TCO Comparisons
Cloud Spanner
(regional replication)
Cloud SQL
(HA)
Cloud Bigtable
(unreplicated)
AWS Aurora
AWS
DynamoDB
Azure
DocumentDB
Resource-based Resource-based Resource-based 3Y RI Pricing On-Demand per-op per-op
Read-heavy workload (50GB storage)
$2,094 $2,226 $1,021 $973 $1,744 $2400 $1887
Mixed Workload (50GB storage)
$2,094 $2,226 $1,021 $973 $1,744 $4,398 $5,333

16. Interaction
gRPC and RESTful client libraries available:
● Java
● Python
● Golang
● NodeJS
● Ruby (upcoming)
● PHP (upcoming)
JDBC Driver is Available as well for limited legacy apps support.
Google Cloud CLI (work with instances, databases and run queries)

17. Data Types & Data Definition Language
Data Types Available:
● BOOL, INT64, FLOAT64, STRING( length ), BYTES( length ), DATE, TIMESTAMP
● ARRAY of scalar types (no access to individual members, read or write the entire array)
Use Cloud Spanner's Data Definition Language (DDL) to work with databases, tables and indexes
● CREATE
● ALTER
● DROP

18. Expressions, Functions, and Operators
● CASTing i.e. CAST(x=1 AS STRING)
● Aggregations, i.e. COUNT, MIN, MAX, AVG, BIT*, SUM
● Mathematical, i.e. SQRT(X)
● String, i.e. LENGTH(value) or SUBSTR(value, position[, length])
● Array, i.e. ARRAY_LENGTH(array_expression)
● Date/Time, i.e. DATE_DIFF(date_expression, date_expression, date_part)
● Conditional, i.e. WHEN, CASE, IF, COALESCE

19. Best Practices & Performance
● Each node can provide up to 10K QPS of reads / 2K QPS of 1KB writes and 2 TiB storage
● Minimum of 3 nodes recommended for production environments (min is one node)
● Carefully choose a primary key (to avoid hotspots)

20. Product Roadmap for 2017
● Multi-Regional replication
● Dataflow | Pub Sub | BigQuery integrations
● Local mock server
● JSON support (repeated and nested fields)
● Writes in SQL

21. Spanner Resources
● Documentation: cloud.google.com/spanner/docs
● Podcast with Deepti Srivastava: goo.gl/tlGAx4
● Optimizing Schema Design for Cloud Spanner: https://goo.gl/4KG1hZ
● Spanner, TrueTime and the CAP Theorem - https://research.google.com/pubs/pub45855.html
● Whitepaper Explained: by Wilson Hsieh - youtube.com/watch?v=NthK17nbpYs
● The Life of Cloud Spanner Reads & Writes - https://goo.gl/vXK1r4
● Life of a Cloud Spanner Query - https://goo.gl/mCyTvW

22. DEMO