Why Google’s Spanner Database Won’t Do As Well As Its Clone

February 15, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Google has proven time and again it is on the extreme bleeding edge of invention when it comes to scale out architectures that make supercomputers look like toys. But what would the world look like if the search engine giant had started selling capacity on its vast infrastructure back in 2005, before Amazon Web Services launched, and then shortly thereafter started selling capacity on its high level platform services? And what if it had open sourced these technologies, as it has done with the Kubernetes container controller?

The world would be surely different, and the reason it is not is …