Google has announced the public beta for Cloud Spanner, a globally distributed relational database service for mission-critical applications.
Through Cloud Spanner, Google says that customers pay for what they use and it features a simple pricing model that charges for the number of Cloud Spanner nodes in a project, actual storage consumption and the amount of network bandwidth used.
Google said on its blog:
When building cloud applications, database administrators and developers have been forced to choose between traditional databases that guarantee transactional consistency, or NoSQL databases that offer simple, horizontal scaling and data distribution.
Cloud Spanner breaks that dichotomy, offering both of these critical capabilities in a single, fully managed service.
Google claims that Cloud Spanner keeps application development simple by supporting standard tools and languages in a familiar relational database environment. The company also adds that the platform is ideal for operational workloads supported by traditional relational databases, including inventory management, financial transactions, and control systems.