aster.cloud aster.cloud
  • /
  • Platforms
    • Public Cloud
    • On-Premise
    • Hybrid Cloud
    • Data
  • Architecture
    • Design
    • Solutions
    • Enterprise
  • Engineering
    • Automation
    • Software Engineering
    • Project Management
    • DevOps
  • Programming
    • Learning
  • Tools
  • About
  • /
  • Platforms
    • Public Cloud
    • On-Premise
    • Hybrid Cloud
    • Data
  • Architecture
    • Design
    • Solutions
    • Enterprise
  • Engineering
    • Automation
    • Software Engineering
    • Project Management
    • DevOps
  • Programming
    • Learning
  • Tools
  • About
aster.cloud aster.cloud
  • /
  • Platforms
    • Public Cloud
    • On-Premise
    • Hybrid Cloud
    • Data
  • Architecture
    • Design
    • Solutions
    • Enterprise
  • Engineering
    • Automation
    • Software Engineering
    • Project Management
    • DevOps
  • Programming
    • Learning
  • Tools
  • About
  • Data
  • Engineering

Rapidly Expand The Reach Of Spanner Databases With Read-Only Replicas And Zero-Downtime Moves

  • aster.cloud
  • March 12, 2023
  • 4 minute read

As Google Cloud’s fully managed relational database that offers near unlimited scale, strong consistency, and availability up to 99.999%, Cloud Spanner powers applications at any scale in industries such as financial services, games, retail, and healthcare.

When you set up a Spanner instance, you can choose from two different kinds of configurations: regional and multi-regional. Both configuration types offer high availability, near unlimited scale, and strong consistency. Regional configurations offer 99.99% availability and can survive zone outages. Multi-regional configurations offer 99.999% availability and can survive two zone outages and entire regional outages.


Partner with aster.cloud
for your next big idea.
Let us know here.



From our partners:

CITI.IO :: Business. Institutions. Society. Global Political Economy.
CYBERPOGO.COM :: For the Arts, Sciences, and Technology.
DADAHACKS.COM :: Parenting For The Rest Of Us.
ZEDISTA.COM :: Entertainment. Sports. Culture. Escape.
TAKUMAKU.COM :: For The Hearth And Home.
ASTER.CLOUD :: From The Cloud And Beyond.
LIWAIWAI.COM :: Intelligence, Inside and Outside.
GLOBALCLOUDPLATFORMS.COM :: For The World's Computing Needs.
FIREGULAMAN.COM :: For The Fire In The Belly Of The Coder.
ASTERCASTER.COM :: Supra Astra. Beyond The Stars.
BARTDAY.COM :: Prosperity For Everyone.

Today, we’re announcing a number of significant enhancements to Spanner’s regional and multi-regional capabilities:

  • Configurable read-only replicas let you add read-only replicas to any regional or multi-regional Spanner instance to deliver low latency reads to clients in any geography
  • Spanner’s zero-downtime instance move service gives you the freedom to move your production Spanner instances from any configuration to another on the fly, with zero downtime, whether it’s regional, multi-regional, or a custom configuration with configurable read-only replicas
  • We’re also dropping the list prices of our nine-replica global multi-regional configurations nam-eur-asia1 and nam-eur-asia3 to make them even more affordable for global workloads

Let’s take a look at each of these enhancements in a bit more detail.

Configurable read-only replicas

One of Spanner’s most powerful capabilities is its ability to deliver high performance across vast geographic territories. Spanner achieves this performance with read-only replicas. As its name suggests, a read-only replica contains an entire copy of the database and it can serve stale reads without requiring a round trip back to the leader region. In doing so, read-only replicas deliver low latency stale reads to nearby clients and help increase a node’s overall read scalability.

Read More  How Google Cloud Can Help Stop Credential Stuffing Attacks

For example, a global online retailer would likely want to ensure that its customers worldwide can search and view products from its catalog efficiently. This product catalog would be ideally suited for Spanner’s nam-eur-asia1 multi-region configuration, which has read/write replicas in the United States and read-only replicas in Belgium and Taiwan. This would ensure that customers can view the product catalog with low latency around the globe.

Until today, read-only replicas were available in several multi-region configurations: nam6, nam9, nam12, nam-eur-asia1, and nam-eur-asia3. But now, with configurable read-only replicas, you can add read-only replicas to any regional or multi-regional Spanner instance so that you can deliver low-latency stale reads to clients everywhere.

To add read-only replicas to a configuration, go to the Create Instance page in the Google Cloud console. You’ll now see a “Configure read-only replicas” section. In this section, select the region for the read-only replica, along with the number of replicas you want per node, and create the instance. It’s as simple as that!

The following snapshot shows how to add a read-only replica in us-west2 (Los Angeles) to the nam3 multi-regional configuration.

As we roll out configurable read-only replicas, we do not yet offer read-only replicas in every configuration/region pair. If you find that your desired read-only replica region is not yet listed, simply fill out this request form.

Configurable read-only replicas are available today for $1/replica/node-hour plus storage costs. Full details on pricing are available at Cloud Spanner pricing.

Also announcing: Spanner’s zero-downtime instance move service

Now that you can use configurable read-only replicas to create new instance configurations that are tailored to your specific needs, how can you migrate your current Spanner instances to these new configurations without any downtime? Spanner database instances are mission critical and can scale to many petabytes and millions of queries per second. So you can imagine that moving a Spanner instance from one configuration to another — say us-central1 in Iowa to nam3 with a read-only replica in us-west2 — is no small feat. Factor in Spanner’s stringent availability of up to 99.999% while serving traffic at extreme scale, and it might seem impossible to move a Spanner instance from us-central1 to nam3 with zero downtime.

Read More  How Google Cloud And Trigo Are Partnering To Power Autonomous Stores

However, that’s exactly what we’re announcing today! With the instance move service, now generally available, you can request a zero-downtime, live migration of your Spanner instances from any configuration to any other configuration — whether they are regional, multi-regional, or custom configurations with configurable read-only replicas.

To request an instance move, select “contact Google” in the Edit Instance of the Google Cloud Console and fill out the instance move request form. Once you make a move request, we’ll contact you to let you know the start date of your instance configuration move, and then move your configuration with zero downtime and no code changes while preserving the SLA guarantees of your configuration.

When moving an instance, both the source and destination instance configurations are subject to hourly compute and storage charges, as outlined in Cloud Spanner pricing. Depending on your environment, instance moves can take anywhere from a few hours to a few days to complete. Most importantly, during the instance move, your Spanner instance continues to run without any downtime, and can continue to rely on Spanner’s high availability, near unlimited scale, and strong consistency to serve your mission-critical production workloads.

Price drops for global 9-replica Spanner multi-regional configurations

Finally, we’re also pleased to announce that we’re making it even more compelling to use Spanner’s global configurations of nam-eur-asia1 and nam-eur-asia3 by dropping the compute list price of these configurations from $9/node/hour to $7/node/hour. With write quorums in North America and read-only replicas in both Europe and Asia, these configurations are perfectly suited for global applications with strict performance requirements and 99.999% availability. And now, they’re even more cost-effective to use!

Read More  Using Envoy To Create Cross-Region Replicas For Cloud Memorystore

Learn more

  • If you are new to Spanner, try Spanner at no charge with a 90-day free trial instance.
  • Learn more about multi-regional Spanner configurations by reading Demystifying Cloud Spanner multi-region configurations

By: Mark Donsky (Senior Product Manager)
Originally published at Google Cloud Blog

Source: Cyberpogo


For enquiries, product placements, sponsorships, and collaborations, connect with us at [email protected]. We'd love to hear from you!

Our humans need coffee too! Your support is highly appreciated, thank you!

aster.cloud

Related Topics
  • Cloud Spanner
  • Database
  • Google Cloud
You May Also Like
View Post
  • Engineering
  • Technology

Apple supercharges its tools and technologies for developers to foster creativity, innovation, and design

  • June 9, 2025
View Post
  • Engineering

Just make it scale: An Aurora DSQL story

  • May 29, 2025
Getting things done makes her feel amazing
View Post
  • Computing
  • Data
  • Featured
  • Learning
  • Tech
  • Technology

Nurturing Minds in the Digital Revolution

  • April 25, 2025
View Post
  • Engineering
  • Technology

Guide: Our top four AI Hypercomputer use cases, reference architectures and tutorials

  • March 9, 2025
View Post
  • Computing
  • Engineering

Why a decades old architecture decision is impeding the power of AI computing

  • February 19, 2025
View Post
  • Engineering
  • Software Engineering

This Month in Julia World

  • January 17, 2025
View Post
  • Engineering
  • Software Engineering

Google Summer of Code 2025 is here!

  • January 17, 2025
View Post
  • Data
  • Engineering

Hiding in Plain Site: Attackers Sneaking Malware into Images on Websites

  • January 16, 2025

Stay Connected!
LATEST
  • 1
    Pure Accelerate 2025: All the news and updates live from Las Vegas
    • June 18, 2025
  • 2
    ‘This was a very purposeful strategy’: Pure Storage unveils Enterprise Data Cloud in bid to unify data storage, management
    • June 18, 2025
  • What is cloud bursting?
    • June 18, 2025
  • 4
    There’s a ‘cloud reset’ underway, and VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 is a chance for Broadcom to pounce on it
    • June 17, 2025
  • What is confidential computing?
    • June 17, 2025
  • Oracle adds xAI Grok models to OCI
    • June 17, 2025
  • Fine-tune your storage-as-a-service approach
    • June 16, 2025
  • 8
    Advanced audio dialog and generation with Gemini 2.5
    • June 15, 2025
  • 9
    A Father’s Day Gift for Every Pop and Papa
    • June 13, 2025
  • 10
    Global cloud spending might be booming, but AWS is trailing Microsoft and Google
    • June 13, 2025
about
Hello World!

We are aster.cloud. We’re created by programmers for programmers.

Our site aims to provide guides, programming tips, reviews, and interesting materials for tech people and those who want to learn in general.

We would like to hear from you.

If you have any feedback, enquiries, or sponsorship request, kindly reach out to us at:

[email protected]
Most Popular
  • Google Cloud, Cloudflare struck by widespread outages
    • June 12, 2025
  • What is PC as a service (PCaaS)?
    • June 12, 2025
  • 3
    Crayon targets mid-market gains with expanded Google Cloud partnership
    • June 10, 2025
  • By the numbers: Use AI to fill the IT skills gap
    • June 11, 2025
  • 5
    Apple services deliver powerful features and intelligent updates to users this autumn
    • June 11, 2025
  • /
  • Technology
  • Tools
  • About
  • Contact Us

Input your search keywords and press Enter.