Re:Blueprint for a distributed multi-region IAM with Go and ...
by audioheavy on Tuesday August 08, 2023 @04:15PM
(#37054879)
I can attest to that statement: comparing Spanner and CockroachDB is difficult. Spanner and Fauna (where I work) are more comparable (Fauna is based on Calvin, see [0]) since they both support strict serializability (in different ways). The article referenced here is excellent, and it highlights what we've seen from some customers: CockroachDB is (to say the least) a challenge to learn and adequately deploy, I've seen a few others that have a similar lessons-learned result. I'm glad, however, that highly consistent distributed databases provide value in these implementations. Although not OSS, Fauna is comparable and more turnkey (read: much less ops) than these options.
[0]: https://fauna.com/blog/distributed-consistency-at-scale-span...
Unfortunately, nothing is ever simple; comparing Spanner and CockroachDB is comparing apples to oranges. We've written an article that details exactly how the differences matter in terms of a Zanzibar implementation[0], but I can give as short of a summary as possible: Spanner is linearizable and CockroachDB only guarantees external consistency for transactions that share rows. The post outlines how we workaround this and we've also more recently talked about how we've managed to scale that to 1M requests per second[1]. Our team focuses a lot on CockroachDB because we offer a permission systems that can span not only regions within a single cloud, but across various cloud providers. However, if you're all in on GCP, SpiceDB itself supports Cloud Spanner (which we also use in production for our GCP-only customers).
[0]: https://authzed.com/blog/prevent-newenemy-cockroachdb
[1]: https://authzed.com/blog/maximizing-cockroachdb-performance