ALICIA WILLIAMS: Cloud Spanner is a relational database
that powers billion-user products every month
It's trusted by banks, retailers,
and many other organizations to support
their mission-critical applications.
So how do you know if Spanner makes sense for you?
Today, we're highlighting three industries
that rely on Spanner to solve challenges, reduce
costs, and accelerate innovation to deliver best
of breed customer experience.
Stay tuned.
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In our last episode, we covered why Spanner is a great option
to hit the optimal balance between scalability,
consistency, and high availability for your database.
In this episode, we're going to connect the dots
to show you how Spanner is being used to solve pressing problems
in financial services, retail, and gaming.
First up, financial services.
Banks, fintech companies, and their regulators
demand 24/7 access to accurate information
in order to drive core operations.
They use Spanner in a wide range of applications,
including payment gateways and online banking.
Payment gateways connect purchases
from many, often millions of customers
to thousands of vendors.
The scale alone can make typical databases buckle.
Compounding the problem, all of this data
needs to be 100% consistent as payments flow
through sophisticated anti-fraud and settlement processes.
Dropping a payment or double counting
would be a serious issue.
Spanner is also used today in online banking
to improve reliability and enable innovation
for mission-critical processes, such as transaction tracking
and user profile management.
Customer demands for new products
and modern interactive experiences
have taxed online banks' databases.
With last generation scale-up technologies,
banks had to rearchitect their systems
to scale in ways their databases weren't designed for.
The result is extra complexity and maintenance.
Developers have to work around a fragmented view of the data,
while operators struggle to ensure uptime
in a stitched together system.
Banks and fintech innovators choose
Spanner because of its industry-leading five
nines of availability, zero plan maintenance downtime, security
certifications, and the highest consistency guarantees
of any scale-out database.
Spanner allows financial services
to scale their databases regionally
or even globally without any downtime or compromises
to the integrity or security of their data.
This scale insurance means they're
able to easily accommodate long-term growth
or unexpected spikes without painful rearchitecture
or downtime.
Spanner eliminates complexity and maintenance overhead
by pushing sharding and replication down
into the database, not as an afterthought.
To your developers and DBAs, it looks
like a single database instance that can scale on-demand.
Spanner is also used in the red hot gaming industry
to support real-time gameplay and in-game purchases that
are driving revenues.
Popular game launches have become cultural touchstones.
Even a niche game can attract millions of global users
at launch who demand interactive gameplay that's always online.
This burst of high volume real-time traffic
can be game over for common databases.
Ensuring play from a gamer in Asia
is immediately visible to her opponent
in South America typically requires manual database
sharding in order to scale.
In modern digital games, database maintenance windows
are also a big risk.
With global players and multiple game franchises,
it can be impossible to schedule downtime
to patch the database or updated schema
to support new capabilities.
For gaming or any other always-on global business,
Spanner is fully managed and never
needs to be paused for patches, backups, failover,
or even schema updates.
Using Google's dedicated infrastructure,
Spanner guarantees consistency and zero plan downtime,
even at the most extreme scale, which
translates into better gameplay and satisfied customers.
Retailers face many of the same challenges as banks and game
studios.
New digital channels, like online shopping
with in-store pickup, digital wallet, and mobile rewards
redemption present new opportunities,
but also impose additional hurdles for already stretched
IT organizations.
Retail supply chains have also become
more complex and on-demand.
Just in time fulfillment and dynamic pricing and e-commerce
mean that a retailer's inventory and product catalog must always
be up to date and consistent.
Stock-outs erode trust from consumers
whose alternative purchasing options are on the rise.
Spanner gives retailers a consistent view
of their inventory, pricing, and demand across channels
and locations without having to hack together data stores
and using the SQL that developers and analysts already
know.
Online orders are immediately reflected in inventory
across online and brick and mortar stores and warehouses,
across thousands of products and hundreds of locations.
If this weren't challenging enough,
retail often experiences extreme seasonal spikes,
like during Black Friday.
In the past, retailers overprovisioned hardware
to handle holiday peaks, but this is increasingly
expensive and inefficient.
Scaling on last generation's databases
requires large upfront expenses and downtime.
New SQL technologies claim web scale
but don't generally support the transactions or SQL
that developers rely on.
Spanner gives retailers the confidence
that they'll be able to handle peak periods
without large upfront costs or maintenance overhead.
Elastic scaling allows them to expand regionally or globally
in a single click.
Later, they can scale back down, paying for only what they use,
without missing a beat.
So there you have it, a dip into the benefits of availability,
consistency, and scalability in fin serve, gaming, and retail.
High availability means you get an industry-leading five nines
uptime and never have to work around plan maintenance again.
Get the strictest level of consistency of any distributed
database without sacrificing scalability
for operational workloads.
And scale out and back in as needed
to avoid costly excess capacity while handling
unpredictability.
This video is just a sampling of the many industries and use
cases where Spanner helps companies solve problems
and grow their business.
So if you're curious to learn more,
follow the links in the description
below for additional information.
Thanks for joining us today and stay
tuned for more episodes of Spanner, database unlimited.
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