Update on Google Cloud Spanner includes Multi-Region Support

Google has added multi-region support to Cloud Spanner. This means that the database can be replicated across regions for lower latency and better performance. Another pleasing feature of the update is the Service Level Agreement (SLA).

The Cloud Spanner is built on Google’s internal Spanner service that was built to serve Google’s global needs. Since Google required a database with global scale, high consistency, and high availability in order to handle products like AdWords, Spanner was created and launched.

With SLA in Cloud Spanner now, databases will have 99.999 percent uptime for workloads and no planned downtime. Simply put, this means that Google is guaranteeing its customers that their database will be down for less than five minutes per year. This feature alone puts the search engine giant in a unique position among cloud providers.

“We have engineered the system to be highly available and efficient and we expect service to be able to provide that. It’s been battle tested with a mission-critical application that Google runs,” said Cloud Spanner product manager, Deepti Srivastava.

Before the update was rolled out, the Cloud Spanner lacked support across multiple regions. This meant that you could run the Cloud Spanner database only in a single location. But of course, that completely changed with the latest update.