Google launching Spanner is generally a positive thing for our industry and our product. It's more proof that what we're aiming for is possible and that there's demand for it. We expect that in five years, all tech companies will be deploying technology like ours.

One of the big differences is that Spanner only uses SQL for read-only operations, with a custom API for writes. We use standard SQL for both reads and writes, which means we also work with major ORMs like GORM, SQLAlchemy, and Hibernate (docs should be live today or tomorrow). Spanner's custom write API will make it difficult to work with existing frameworks, or to convert an existing application to Spanner.

Cloud Spanner only works on Google Cloud and is a black-box managed service. CockroachDB is open source and can be run on-prem or in any cloud on commodity hardware. (We don't offer CockroachDB as a service yet, but may in the future)

At this point, both products are still in beta and are still missing features like back-up and restore (according to the Quizlet blog post). We plan to launch CockroachDB 1.0 with back-up / restore enabled.

* For anyone wanting to know more about how we make CockroachDB work without TrueTime, see our blog post: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/living-without-atomic-clo...

No startup will be able to replicate that anytime soon, a lot of time (and money) has been put into it by a lot of people over a long time.

Could any government? Has any government?

My impression is that, infrastructure wise, Google is genuinely in a class of size one.

How much more infrastructure do they have besides AWS? How much does Google have besides GCP?

I don't think you can draw any definitive conclusions from this, but calling it a class of size 1 or 2 is probably an overstatement of Google (+/- Amazon)'s advantage over Microsoft at least.

NSA's annual budget is $50bn. U.S. military budget is about $600bn.

Google's revenue is $90bn and they don't spend all of it.

> A simple statement of the contrast between Spanner and CockroachDB would be: Spanner always waits on writes for a short interval, whereas CockroachDB sometimes waits on reads for a longer interval. How long is that interval? Well it depends on how clocks on CockroachDB nodes are being synchronized. Using NTP, it’s likely to be up to 250ms. Not great, but the kind of transaction that would restart for the full interval would have to read constantly updated values across many nodes. In practice, these kinds of use cases exist but are the exception.

CockroachDB is waiting for time keeping hardware to improve.

https://www.ntpsec.org/