[timmg]

> Sooo they're finally launching a Spanner contender?

It may be even better in one important way: (if I understand correctly) for Spanner, you have to provision servers -- and keep them running. So GCP version of Spanner really makes no sense for anything that isn't huge.

This sounds more like "Spanner as a Service" -- which is something I've always wanted (for my hobby projects, no less :)

Unless I misundertood, anyway.