Cloud spanner, Google’s globally distributed take on relational databases, is now generally available. The service was in beta for past four months, and became production ready starting today.
And similar to the vision that was put forth by Google during Cloud spanner’s launch, the company is projecting this solution as an alternative to enterprises who have already scaled up their respective relational database solutions.
Google is guaranteeing 99.999% availability and strong consistency — without compromising latency. As a combined software/hardware solution that includes atomic clocks and GPS receivers across Google’s global network, Cloud Spanner also offers additional accuracy, reliability and performance in the form of a fully-managed cloud database service.
The timing of the availability of the production level suite of cloud spanner is pretty interesting. This comes right on the heels of Microsoft announcing its Cosmos DB service. Both are intensely fighting it to lure as many bigger, more known enterprise clients as they can, while Amazon steals the public cloud market.
And while both Cosmos and Cloud spanner are offering similar features and advantages, former being a Microsoft product — a company which is a known favourite in a host of business productivity solutions — gives cosmos a slight advantage.
As starter clients, Google has tied up with the likes of Informatica, Alooma and Xplenty as cloud spanner beta testers.
