But, and I'm honestly asking, you as a GKE user don't have to manage that spanner instance, right? So, you should in theory be able to just throw higher loads at it and spanner should be autoscaling?

Yes, from the article:

> To support the cluster’s massive scale, we relied on a proprietary key-value store based on Google’s Spanner distributed database... We didn’t witness any bottlenecks with respect to the new storage system and it showed no signs of it not being able to support higher scales.

Yeah, I guess my question was a bit more nuanced. What I was curious about was if they were fully relying on normal autoscaling that any customer would get or were they manually scaling the spanner instance in anticipation of the load? I guess it's unlikely we're going to get that level of detailed info from this article though.