Spanner and Cockroach
June 30, 2016
I read “Google Tools Up with Its Spanner Database, Looks for a Fight with AWS.” Interesting. Google continues to innovate in data management systems. Its MapReduce tool helped “spark” the Hadoopers. Now Spanner is moving into a cloud war fighting machine. The write up reports:
Google has gone on the record to talk about Spanner in the past, saying its an SQL-like database that can run across multiple data centers, and is capable of scaling up to millions of machines in hundreds of data centers and trillions of database rows. It is “the first system to distribute data at global scale and support externally-consistent distributed transactions,” Google has said. Spanner’s most appealing feature is that it supports synchronous replication, which means that any changes made to the database will automatically be replicated across every data center in real-time, so the data stays consistent regardless of where it’s accessed from.
But what is interesting to me is the headline: “A fight with AWS.” Let’s see how the Amazon fight is progressing. Amazon has a big cloud business. Amazon has a number of options to expand its enterprise services. Amazon has a big ecommerce business the costs of which are partially offset by the Amazon cloud business. Amazon has a search system which in my opinion is a work in progress.
Google has a fight with the EU and the challenge of those Facebookers’ surging ad business. Google also has the task of solving death and getting the Loon balloons aloft and generating revenue. Now the company, according to the write up, wants to fight with Amazon.
Fascinating. Oh, and details of the new data management system and its application to folks with real world problems? Not much info. I love to sit on the sidelines when companies allegedly engage in a multi-front war.
Stephen E Arnold, June 30, 2016