Media outlets are reporting that Google is considering commercializing its Spanner distributed database technology. The company uses Spanner internally to run many of its core services, and now engineers from its cloud computing arm are said to be considering how to make Spanner available to outside developers. However, the effort could take some time as Spanner is closely integrated with Google’s proprietary hardware and network technology.
In the past, Google has said that Spanner is SQL-like and is “the first system to distribute data at global scale and support externally-consistent distributed transactions.”