At its annual Cloud Next conference, Google Cloud today announced the general availability of Cloud Spanner Data Boost. Data Boost is a fully managed serverless service that allows users to analyze their data in Google Cloud’s globally distributed database via services like BigQuery, Spark on Dataproc or Dataflow without impacting the transactional workflows in Spanner.
“It’s a breakthrough technology that delivers high-performance, on-demand processing of operational data with near zero impact on customers’ business-critical applications,” explained Andi Gutmans, VP and GM, Databases at Google Cloud.
The promise of Data Boost is that users will be able to run ad hoc queries that need to access a lot of data without creating what would otherwise be enough overhead to slow down the transactional workloads on Spanner and the applications that depend on those. Google says it does so by using its disaggregated compute and storage architecture for Spanner, which also forms the underpinning of Google’s own services like YouTube, Gmail and Google Ads, for example.
