We shared some details about Gmail's migration to Spanner in this year's developer keynote at Google Cloud Next [0] - to my knowledge, the first time that story has been publicly talked about.
It’s a pretty big deal if Gmail migrated to GCP-provided Spanner(not to an internal Spanner instance) and sounds like he kind of vote of confidence GCP and Cloud Spanner could benefit from: might I suggest to write about it? It’s easier to digest and harder to miss than an hour-long keynote video with no time stamps.
And so just to confirm: Gmail is on Cloud Spanner for the backend?
When I worked at Google I tried to get more services to migrate to the cloud but the internal environment that was built up over 25 years is much better at supporting billion+ users with private data.
It doesn't make much sense to have a 'better' version of a product you sell but keep it internal.
I don't think they would've migrated again to GCP Spanner (even if it would've been a show of faith).
https://www.youtube.com/live/268jdNwH6AM?si=WkgnvqaIwFidt-hc...
Source: I was on the last team running our own [[redacted]].
link with time-stamp:
This wasn't the first time Gmail has replaced the storage backend in-flight. The last time, around 2011, they didn't hype it up, they called it "a storage software update" in public comms. And that other migration is the origin of the term "spannacle", because during that migration the accounts that resisted moving from [[redacted]] to [[redacted]] we called barnacles.