New multi-region configuration for Cloud Spanner service in Asia and Europe

Cloud Spanner is our scalable relational database service Google Cloud. Spanner's core tenet is to ensure high availability of applications with strong consistency. To support this, Google has launched two Spanners multi-regions New offers availability to 99.999%: multi-region Asia (asia1) and multi-region Europe (eur5). More multi-regions allow you to deliver a consistent, high-quality customer experience to users around the world while ensuring high availability.

Multi-region configuration brings many benefits

• 99.999% availability: Spanner's multi-region architecture supports high business continuity and provides protection against single-region dependencies. The new multi-region asia1 and eur5 provide even higher availability than the regional Spanner counterparts (99.999% vs. 99.99%) without compromising scaling or ensuring Spanner's strong consistency .
• Data Allocation: Spanner automatically replicates your data between regions while ensuring high consistency. This allows you to serve global customers by assimilating data to computers near your users to provide low-latency data access.
• External Consistency: Although Spanner automatically splits data across multiple machines and replicates it across geographically distant locations, you can still use Spanner as if it were a database running on a single machine. Transactions are guaranteed to be serializable, and the order of transactions in the database is the same as the order in which the client executes committed transactions.

Spanner has seen strong growth in Asia across sectors such as financial services, retail, healthcare, media and entertainment, and gaming. The new asia1 region will enable companies in that region to launch new digital services with high performance and availability that meet consumer expectations and enable continued business growth.

How new Spanner regions provide high availability and scalability

Google heard from Fukuoka Financial Group (FFG), a leading banking and finance company in Japan, about their selection and use of Spanner.

“For our digital banking system currently under development, we needed a database that could be continuously expanded based on demand, providing strong internal consistency,” Masaaki said. in addition, good performance and extreme availability enable us to deliver an unprecedented experience to our consumers.” Miyamoto, chief executive officer, Zero Bank Design Factory Co., Ltd. (subsidiary of FFG). “We found Spanner to be the only relational database that met our needs. We're excited that Spanner now offers an Asia multi-regional configuration that delivers 99.999% available SLA, allowing us to build highly scalable enterprise applications. Accenture is supporting us in developing our banking system.”

A multi-region Spanner includes a minimum of three regions and five replicas; Spanner today supports multiple zones with five, seven, or nine replicas in a single server configuration. In addition to read-write replicas and read-only replicas, many regions support a witness region that uses identical replicas. A witness replica does not serve reads, but helps commit writes, thus helping to achieve the remaining number of writes. Multi-region Asia1 has five replicas and witness region is located in asia-northeast3 (Seoul).

Multi-region asia1 is configured as follows:

• asia-northeast1 (Tokyo) defaults to the top 
• asia-northeast2 (Osaka) is the second region
• asia-northeast3 (Seoul) is the witness region

Mercari, an e-commerce company, and Merpay, its mobile payments division, have been successful in building apps with Spanner.

Singo Ishimura, GAE Meister at Mercari, Inc. said: “We started using Spanner for our new mobile payments service Merpay in 2018 and since then we have expanded its use across other business units within the organization . Its ability to scale seamlessly has allowed us to focus on building business logic in our applications instead of worrying about database management. We at Mercari/Merpay are excited about the recent launch of multi-region Spanner Asia, as we now have options to run workloads powered by Spanner's multi-region configuration. ”

The new European Multi-Region (eur5) will enable customers in specific industries such as financial services to keep local copies of their data and provide 99.999% availability for their workloads. Eur5 is multi-regional, similar to eur3, with five replicas, with witness region in europe-west4 (Netherlands). Euro5 configuration details are as follows:

1. • europe-west2 (London) comes first by default
   • europe-west1 (Belgium) second region
   • europe-west4 (Netherlands) witness area

We heard from Google Cloud partner Accenture Japan about their experience introducing Spanner to customers.

“A distributed database with write access scale, is a key component to achieving transformation,” said Keisuke Yamane, managing director, Accenture Technology, Intelligent Software Engineering Services at Accenture Japan Ltd. digital. for Spanner because of the unique characteristics of both distributed and relational databases. This new Asia multi-regional configuration will lead to greater use of Spanner in regulated industries such as the financial sector, such as Zero Bank Design Factory Inc., the life sciences sector and others. . Accenture will accelerate clients' digital transformation based on the MAINRI platform that fully utilizes Google Cloud, including Spanner."

You can easily use new multi-region configurations using the Spanner API, user interface (UI), or command line interface (CLI), as part of the versioning process. For more information, review document and configuration details panel in the user interface.

Source: Gimasys