Hacker News Reader

Comment by gregdoesit | Hacker News Reader

Surely in a post about Google Cloud Spanner, all examples mentioned use Google Cloud Spanner? It would be moot listing them as examples if they would not: so my assumption is they are all using GCP infra already for Spanner.

I really want to give Google the benefit of the doubt: but it doesn't help that they did not write that eg Gmail is using "Cloud Spanner." They wrote that it uses Spanner.

View on HN

This is putting a lot of faith in GCP advertising. I strongly doubt the idea that the Google workloads discussed are deployed on GCP instead of internal Borg infrastructure.

Years ago they did a reorg and moved all infrastructure services under Cloud even though they are not Cloud products. That would enable this kind of obfuscation because Cloud is literally responsible for both Cloud Spanner and non-Cloud Spanner and they can conflate these two in their marketing copy. They probably feel justified in doing so because they share so much code.

Considering that most of Google does not run on GCP, I would not give them the benefit of the doubt.

Photos, Gmail, and Ads use Spanner, not Cloud Spanner.

Apparently Cloud Spanner doesn't support protobuf columns? It would be hard for any internal Google product to use it under that restriction.

Infra and Cloud Spanner are the same stack. Having those services run on infra is more about the legacy of tooling to shift it rather than anything around performance or ability to handle it

Reply on news.ycombinator.com