Google Cloud

Cloud Spanner is now production-ready; let the migrations begin!

May 16, 2017

Dominic Preuss

Director of Product Management

Cloud Spanner, the world’s first horizontally-scalable and strongly-consistent relational database service, is now generally available for your mission-critical OLTP applications.

We’ve carefully designed Cloud Spanner to meet customer requirements for enterprise databases — including ANSI 2011 SQL support, ACID transactions, 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. Thanks to this unique combination of qualities, Cloud Spanner is already delivering long-term value for our customers with mission-critical applications in the cloud, including customer authentication systems, business-transaction and inventory-management systems, and high-volume media systems that require low latency and high throughput. For example, Snap uses Cloud Spanner to power part of its search infrastructure.

Looking toward migration

In preparation for general availability, we’ve been working closely with our partners to make adoption as smooth and easy as possible. Thus today, we're also announcing our initial data integration partners: Alooma, Informatica and Xplenty.

Now that these partners are in the early stages of Cloud Spanner “lift-and-shift” migration projects for customers, we asked a couple of them to pass along some of their insights about the customer value of Cloud Spanner, as well as any advice about planning for a successful migration:

From Alooma

Cloud Spanner is a game-changer because it offers horizontally scalable, strongly consistent, highly available OLTP infrastructure in the cloud for the first time. To accelerate migrations, we recommend that customers replicate their data continuously between the source OLTP database and Cloud Spanner, thereby maintaining both infrastructures in the same state — this allows them to migrate their workloads gradually in a predictable manner.

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From Informatica

Informatica customers are stretching the limits of latency and data volumes, and need innovative enterprise-scale capabilities to help them outperform their competition. We are excited about Cloud Spanner because it provides a completely new way for our mutual customers to disrupt their markets. For integration, migration and other use cases, we are partnering with Google to help them ingest data into Cloud Spanner and integrate a variety of heterogeneous batch, real-time, and streaming data in a highly scalable, performant and secure way.

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From Xplenty

Cloud Spanner is one of those cloud-based technologies for which businesses have been waiting: With its horizontal scalability and ACID compliance, it’s ideal for those who seek the lower TCO of a fully managed cloud-based service without sacrificing the features of a legacy, on-premises database. In our experience with customers migrating to Cloud Spanner, important considerations include accounting for data types, embedded code and schema definitions, as well as understanding Cloud Spanner’s security model to efficiently migrate your current security and access-control implementation.

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Next steps

We encourage you to dive into a no-cost trial to experience first-hand the value of a relational database service that offers strong consistency, mission-critical availability and global scale (contact us about multi-regional instances) with no workarounds — and with no infrastructure for you to deploy, scale or manage. (Read more about Spanner’s evolution inside Google in this new paper presented at the SIGMOD ‘17 conference today.) If you like what you see, a growing partner ecosystem is standing by for migration help, and to add further value to Cloud Spanner use cases via data analytics and visualization tooling.

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