Spanner Omni Reaches GA, Replacing Google's Atomic Clocks and File System with Software

Google has made Spanner Omni generally available, running its distributed SQL database on-premises, across clouds or on a laptop. Doing so meant replacing Colossus with a Colossus-like abstraction layer and TrueTime with software-based time synchronization. There is no availability SLA, and practitioners are pricing the move in tail latency and operational toil.

By Steef-Jan Wiggers