Celebrating Spanner's Journey and the Future of Distributed SQL

When AWS introduced Aurora DSQL, it sparked some interesting conversations from industry peers, and it reminded me of the groundbreaking moments that shaped Spanner’s journey.?

Celebrating Progress

I welcome Amazon to the distributed SQL community with the preview launch of Amazon Aurora DSQL. It highlights the needs that we identified when we built Spanner, more than 15 years ago. Over that period Spanner has evolved to support some of the most demanding, global workloads for household brands, like Yahoo, The Home Depot, Uber, Wayfair, Pokémon Go, Gmail, and YouTube.

It's exciting to see AWS is beginning to understand the value that distributed SQL databases can offer. We have pioneered the future of this technology and we welcome folks to join us in solving hard customer problems.

The Journey to Spanner

In 2009, Google’s growth outpaced the ability of off-the-shelf databases to scale. Challenges like downtime for schema changes, sharding complexities, and replication lag surfaced at critical times—when the business was growing the fastest. To address these limitations, we leveraged Google’s distributed data expertise to design a database fundamentally reimagined for the global, online economy.

Spanner: Innovations and Evolution

Spanner incorporates groundbreaking technologies like TrueTime for precise time synchronization and Colossus, Google’s distributed storage service, delivering a level of scale and reliability that traditional database architectures couldn’t achieve. It's good to see DSQL adopt similar foundational principles, reinforcing the importance of these innovations in distributed SQL.

Since its inception (Spanner paper), Spanner has evolved from a groundbreaking distributed SQL database into a versatile, intelligent platform. We've expanded its functional capabilities, optimized to provide compelling price-performance, re-architected for best-in-class reliability and security, and enhanced the developer experience with PostgreSQL compatibility. These advancements solidify Spanner's position as a leading platform for next-generation applications. Today, Spanner handles over 4 billion queries per second at peak and more than 15 exabytes of data, with unparalleled availability and global consistency.

Spanner: A Platform for Innovation

With Spanner Graph, full-text search and vector search, we have evolved Spanner from being the most available, globally consistent and scalable database, to a multi-model database with intelligent capabilities that seamlessly interoperate to enable you to deliver a new class of AI-enabled applications. And of course, it has been hardened over the years to deliver unprecedented availability, scalability, and security needed to run Google’s many billion user businesses.?

Spanner is not just a database; it's a platform for innovation. By empowering developers to build sophisticated applications with ease, Spanner is shaping the future of database technology. As businesses continue to demand more from their data, Spanner will remain the go-to choice for those seeking the highest levels of performance, reliability, data integrity, and flexibility.

Looking Ahead

The Engineer in me is so excited to see all the new problems developer are solving that we once thought were impossible —whether it's building AI-driven applications, optimizing global-scale systems, or unlocking entirely new use cases we haven’t yet imagined with Spanner.

For me, the journey doesn’t end with what we’ve built, but continues with what’s next. I look forward to seeing how the developer community pushes the boundaries of Spanner and distributed SQL to meet tomorrow’s challenges.?

If you're curious and want to know more about how Spanner is pushing the boundaries or have a problem that you thought that an even a massively distributed database cannot solve, let's chat.

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