Nomulus is software that runs a domain name registry, including most notably the .app TLD. There are three fundamental objects at play here; the domains themselves, contacts (ownership information that goes into WHOIS), and hosts (nameserver information that feeds into DNS). There's a many-to-many relationship here, in that contacts and hosts can be reused over an arbitrarily large number of domains.
The problem is that you can't perform transactions over an arbitrarily large number of different objects in Cloud Datastore; you're limited to enlisting a maximum of 25 entity groups. This means that you can't perform operations that are strongly consistent when contacts or hosts are reused too often. This situation comes up a lot; registrars tend to reuse the same nameservers across many domains, as well as the contacts used for privacy/proxy services.
These problems don't arise in a relational SQL database, because you can simply JOIN the relevant tables together (provided you have the correct indexes set up) and then perform your operations in a strongly consistent manner. That trades off scalability for consistency though, whereas in Spanner you give up neither.