Spanner: Google's Globally-Distributed Database

This technical paper from Google describes Spanner, a globally distributed database that enables highly available and consistent data management across multiple datacenters. Spanner uniquely provides externally consistent distributed transactions, a feature that ensures a consistent view of data despite the challenges of distributed systems. This is achieved through a novel time API called TrueTime, which explicitly accounts for clock uncertainty, enabling Spanner to guarantee a globally consistent view of data across all its nodes. The paper explores the architecture, design choices…