Are cross-server transactions scalable? Would anyone architect a system that did them en masse unless they absolutely 100% had to?
I am just speculating here but I doubt that YouTube migrated to Spanner so that they could do cross-server transactions. I would think consolidating the Ops burden into the GCP org and also serving as a trophy "customer" were higher on the list of reasons. But again, just speculating...
Re:Migrating Facebook to MySQL 8.0
by derekperkins on Thursday July 22, 2021 @09:56PM
(#27926429)
Yeah, Google policy was to migrate everything to Spanner, not a technical decision.
> Are cross-server transactions scalable? Would anyone architect a system that did them en masse unless they absolutely 100% had to?
As a long time Vitess user and contributor/maintainer, this perfectly describes the issue. Minimal effort has been put into solving cross shard / 2PC transactions because a well designed system rarely needs it.
The Spanner team noticeably put out https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/databases/inside-clou... a few years back, which tl;drs that they managed to get a reliable enough network that partitions don't really happen anymore and so you can get both C _and_ A from the CAP theorem. I don't think that Vitess is quite at that level, especially since you can self-host it and thus the devs don't have such network-level uptime guarantees.