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Re:Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service by edaemon on Tuesday February 14, 2017 @09:21PM (#13649192)
While I'm not familiar with Spanner's inner workings, I would guess that they recommend 3 instances for quorum establishment in case a region becomes unreachable. If that's the case, using fewer than 3 instances could cause major problems.
Re:Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service by dragonwriter on Wednesday February 15, 2017 @01:05AM (#13650084)
Since Spanner currently only supports single-region deployments, it clearly isn't recommended as protection against a region becoming unavailable.

It may be recommended as protection against an availability issue on an instance, though, which is, after all, a big reason why you'd want a distributed DB in production.

Re:Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service by edaemon on Wednesday February 15, 2017 @12:41PM (#13653765)
I suppose the loss of a region doesn't apply (yet), but yes, the quorum requirement would still apply even if you only had instances in a single region.
Re:Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service by inlined on Wednesday February 15, 2017 @02:34AM (#13650380)
Even within a single region you can put three nodes in different zones.