Highlights from keynote Day 2 by Urs Hölzle at #GoogleNext17

Second day of GCP Next is opened by Urs Hölzle presenting the current state of GCP and hyped their recent announcement of Cloud Spanner. It really makes a point of how fast GCP has grown over the years, and how they’re making services out of what started out as internal systems. Like Hangout and Cloud Spanner. Let’s focus on the later one.

There’s been a lot of buzz around the Cloud Spanner lately. Only the fact that it’s running with 8 atomic clocks for delivering on consistency is a strong indicator of the ambition and effort put into it. What really struck me during the demo of Cloud Spanner is how well-formed the usage is. Comparing to, as Greg DeMichellie states, the hassle of configuring and maintaining a relational sequel database on the cost of either horizontally scaling or consistency. DeMichellie gives the example of ticket selling, you want to make sure to sell every ticket, and every ticket only once. What is really fascinating about the demo is how this piece of advanced revolutionary piece of software is offered and managed in a very neat and nice format. Changing the schema, adjusting the capacity is as easy as a few clicks in a nice UI.

With that said, I think Cloud Spanner is remarkable in at least two ways, first of all in what the database offer from a technical point of view. The second part, is how they could removing unwanted complexity from the configurations by building the software in a new way.

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