Since Google uses Spanner in-house extensively, it is likely to be available for a good long time.
True
> it is likely to be available for a good long time.
Where does this conclusion come from?
The google mapreduce paper was released in 2004. [0]
"By 2014, Google was no longer using MapReduce as their primary Big Data processing model" [1]
The google spanner paper was released in 2012.
If spanner lives as long as mapreduce it will be largely replaced in 5 years.
[0] https://research.google.com/archive/mapreduce.html
[1] http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2014/06/25/googl...
However, it is still very much available. There are still many important production MapReduce jobs running AIUI.
[work at Google]
Map Reduce is still supported today. Most teams have chosen to move to newer infrastructure because it is better. Nobody forced those teams to move.
Here Google has not dropped support, but has invented something better.
[Disclaimer - work at Google, but not on anything related to Cloud]
https://cloud.google.com/prediction/docs/end-of-life-faq
"As we've expanded our Cloud Machine Learning services, many of the use-cases supported by Cloud Prediction API can be better served by Cloud Machine Learning Engine."
In this case "invent something better" == "drop support".