Customers love Cloud Spanner because it gives them the benefits of relational semantics and SQL while also delivering the scale and availability of non-relational databases. Many of these customers want to move even more of their work to Spanner, and have requested smaller instance sizes to support development, testing and small production workloads. We’re happy to announce that they’ll soon get what they asked for: more granular instance sizing is coming to Spanner.

Granular instance sizing will be available in Public Preview soon. With this feature, you can run workloads on Spanner at as low as 1/10th the cost of regular instances, equating to approximately $65/month.

In addition, we are launching new enterprise capabilities to break down operational silos for real-time insights and provide greater database observability to developers: 

• Datastream, now in public preview, is a change data capture (CDC) service that allows enterprises to synchronize data across heterogeneous databases and applications. With Spanner support in Datastream, users will be able to stream data from MySQL or Oracle to Spanner reliably and with minimal latency. 
• BigQuery federation to Spanner (coming soon) lets users query transactional data residing in Spanner, from BigQuery, without moving or copying data. 
• Key Visualizer, available now in public preview, provides interactive monitoring so developers can quickly identify trends and usage patterns in Spanner. 

Democratizing access with more granular instance sizing 

Today, customers provision Spanner instances by specifying the number of nodes they need to run their workloads. Each node can provide up to 10,000 queries per second (QPS) of reads or 2,000 QPS of writes (writing single rows at 1 KB of data per row) and 2 TB of storage. A Spanner node is replicated across 3 zones for regional instances, and 5 or more zones for multi-regional instances. The choice of node count determines the amount of serving and storage resources that are available to the databases in a given instance. 

Historically, the most granular unit for provisioning resources on Spanner has been one node. To enable more granular control, we are introducing Processing Units (PUs); one Spanner node is equal to 1,000 PUs. Customers can now provision in batches of 100 PUs, and get a proportionate amount of compute and storage resources. This will allow teams to run smaller workloads on Spanner at much lower cost. With this feature, customers can start at 100 PUs and scale up as needed in batches of 100 PUs, to up to 1,000 PUs (1 node), all with zero downtime. Subsequently, customers can continue to scale up by adding more nodes, just like what they do today. Customers do have the choice of using either PUs or nodes to provision resources within workloads, when those workloads occupy multiple nodes of capacity. 

To illustrate with an example, let’s say a game developer creates a Spanner instance called “baseball-game” in us-central1, with 100 PU compute capacity at $65/month price.

As you can see below, proportional maximum storage of 205 GB is assigned to the 100 PU instance.

Once the game starts becoming popular and resource demands increase, the user edits the instance to increase the compute capacity to 500 PUs with proportional maximum 1 TB of storage.

The game grows in popularity, and the gaming company prepares to launch a much-awaited capability in the game. Anticipating a sharp increase in usage at launch day, the game developers increase the compute capacity to 3,000 PUs. Compute capacity assigned to the instance over a period of time can be viewed in Cloud Monitoring graphs:

Request Access 
You can request early access to granular instance sizing feature by filling this form.

Breaking down operational silos with Datastream CDC and BigQuery federation

BigQuery Federation. BigQuery has made analytics easy by bringing together data from multiple sources for seamless analysis. Soon you’ll also be able to analyze data in Spanner directly in BigQuery. With  Spanner’s BigQuery federation, you’ll be able to instantly query data residing in Spanner in real-time without moving or copying the data. Simply set up the Spanner as an external data source in BigQuery, as shown below.

Change Data Capture ingest. Now in public preview, Datastream lets you stream change data into Google Cloud from MySQL and Oracle databases. As of today, you can ingest this change data directly into Spanner using a built-in Dataflow template. This lets you migrate data from MySQL and Oracle databases into Spanner in near-real time.

Understanding performance and resource usage with Key Visualizer

Key Visualizer is a new interactive monitoring tool that lets developers and administrators analyze usage patterns in Spanner. It reveals trends and outliers in key performance and resource metrics for databases of any size, helping to optimize queries and reduce infrastructure costs. Designed for performance tuning and instance sizing, Key Visualizer is available today in public preview in the web-based Cloud Console for all Spanner databases at no additional cost. Learn more in the Key Visualizer blog. 

Learn more

• To request early access to granular instance sizing in Spanner, fill out this form.
• To get started with Spanner today, create an instance or try it out with a Spanner Qwiklab.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in TechPulse Belgium, where Jack Buser, Google Cloud’s Director of Game Industry Solutions, shared his trends for the industry this year.

The year 2022 will hold many surprises (with a few already dropping!), but there’s one near certainty: By this time next year there will be millions more gamers worldwide. It’s thanks to the industry’s little-noted technology growth drivers, which are getting stronger. 

Games are no longer a niche hobby; it’s global, mainstream entertainment. There were 3.1 billion gamers worldwide in 2020. It’s estimated that by 2024 there will be another 500 million. With a global population of 7.7 billion, that’s nearly half the planet. Revenues in 2021 may reach $175 billion—likely more than movies, music, and books combined. 

It’s a strength unique to the games industry, driven by the way its creators deploy new technology. Advances we see in everything from pricing and emerging markets, to backend computing and delivery suggests it will grow from here, on things like artificial intelligence and planet-scale networks.

Games forever, game better

It’s no surprise that videogames have become a huge business. Playing games is one of our deepest human expressions. There is a 4,500 year old board game that people still play, a testimony to the human love of testing cleverness, honing reactions, building trust, or just enlivening a day.

Video games do all that and for decades game makers have taken the most cutting-edge computing tech to make things better. We’ve seen electronic ping pong become shooting asteroids, to simple (yet iconic) 2D sprites evolve into believable, expressive 3D characters, all leading to today’s immersive worlds hosting tens of millions of players worldwide.

There’s more to come. I work at technology’s cutting edge for games, offering the world’s leading game creators access to powerful cloud computing, a low-latency global network, Machine Learning and AI, and much more. As usual, game innovators are taking up all these tools, building new narratives, new ways to play, new markets, and new jaw-dropping moments.

And game creators aren’t just thinking about players; they’re also thinking about viewers. More and more people are watching eSports, and creators are using the games medium to engage their viewers in increasingly immersive ways.

Streaming like never before 

AI and ML are sharpening games and attracting new players in other ways. These technologies increasingly power everything from network performance to global player matching. The delicate but essential work of encouraging newcomers and discouraging bad actors, optimizing monetization, or building and scaling up new player environments.

Another important area we’re seeing cloud tools being put to use is in coordinating the workflows of global teams of developers. It’s not just a question of building faster anymore, but of collaborating and responding more effectively. The distributed work trends that featured so strongly during the pandemic had already featured in much of the game industry, increasingly it’s an industry standard. This will likely mean even faster and more diverse game development, addressing the needs of new markets where we’re seeing double-digit growth.

Tools like cloud streaming, 5G, and edge computing are likely to accelerate the use of Game Streaming, Augmented Reality, and other types of immersive gameplay. If my metaverse doesn’t have games, count me out! We’re looking at some exciting new developments in coming months with some major industry players. Stay tuned.

A big year for the games industry

As a premier provider of solutions, tools and services to games companies, our engineering job is complex and global. Fortunately, our mission is simple: Help game companies transform to meet new global opportunities with planet scale solutions. Technology has brought the gaming industry to astonishing heights, and is the perfect compliment to great storytelling and creative ingenuity. 

As a decades-long industry veteran, I’ve never been more impressed with what technology can do for our industry. Looking past 2022, when we’ll see more compute, more AI, more AR, and more innovation around healthy and exciting game play, there is just one near certainty: More growth.

Today we are excited to announce that Google and the Istio Steering Committee have submitted the Istio project for consideration as an incubating project within the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). This is a significant milestone for Istio and its community, and we are thrilled to reach this next step in the evolution of the project.

Google and Istio

Google originated the Istio project, which alongside Kubernetes and Knative, is a critical part of cloud-native infrastructure. The Istio project has found success and maturity in its current model — being adopted by hundreds of organizations and bringing in over 4,000 developers for IstioCon.

For over 20 years, Google has helped shape the future of computing with its open source contributions and has invested deeply to unlock innovation for our customers. Istio extends Kubernetes to establish a programmable, application-aware network using the Envoy service proxy. Istio works with both Kubernetes-based and traditional workloads, and brings standard, universal traffic management, telemetry, and security to complex deployments. Finding a home in the CNCF brings Istio closer to the cloud-native ecosystem and will foster continuing open innovation.

The Istio journey

We started to develop Istio in partnership with teams at IBM and Lyft in 2016 based on patterns that were being used to connect Google production applications. Google’s security focus complemented the traffic management focus of an open-source project published by IBM, and those two teams decided to collaborate on Istio directly. Istio was launched “fully formed” in May 2017, with the v0.1 release featuring sidecar-powered traffic control, observability and policy features — the things that today define a service mesh. Istio has been open source from the beginning, and has a governance structure that promotes continuous contribution and project engagement.

By the release of v0.3 a few months later there were users trusting it in production, seeing immediate benefits from its powerful features. The project reached v1.0 in July 2018, and was being used at scale by eBay and The Weather Company. Google led a major re-architecture with the release of v1.5, unifying the control plane into a single service. This change, based on user feedback, reduced administrative overhead, as was later written about in the IEEE Software journal. We also greatly simplified extensibility of the mesh by building support for WebAssembly plugins into Envoy.

Istio is now offered as a managed or hosted service by over 20 providers, including Anthos Service Mesh, a suite of tools that helps you monitor and manage a reliable service mesh on-premises or on Google Cloud.

The future of Istio as a project in the CNCF

At Google, we believe that using open source comes with a responsibility to contribute, sustain, and improve the ecosystem, and we are committed to improving critical cloud-native projects on behalf of our customers and the community at large. Google has made over half of all contributions to Istio and two-thirds of the commits, as measured by the CNCF DevStats.1 After deciding to adopt Envoy for Istio, Google rose to be Envoy’s number-one contributor.2

Istio is the last major component of organizations’ Kubernetes ecosystem to sit outside of the CNCF, and its APIs are well-aligned to Kubernetes. On the heels of our recent donation of Knative to the CNCF, acceptance of Istio will complete our cloud-native stack under the auspices of the foundation, and bring Istio closer to the Kubernetes project. Joining the CNCF also makes it easier for contributors and customers to demonstrate support and governance in line with the standards of other critical cloud-native projects, and we are excited to help support the growth and adoption of the project as a result.

Istio is key to the future of Google Cloud and if the project is accepted, Google will continue to strategically invest in Istio as a key maintainer and through ongoing investment in engineering for upstream contributions.

^{1. https://istio.teststats.cncf.io/d/5/companies-table?orgId=1
2. https://envoy.devstats.cncf.io/d/5/companies-table?orgId=1}

As an SAP user, you may already be familiar with SAP Landscape Management (SAP LaMa) — a specialized product that supports centralized management of your SAP landscape. SAP LaMa is useful for a wide range of SAP customers and use cases, but it’s especially important to large enterprises that manage very large, diverse, and often geographically dispersed SAP landscapes.

Google Cloud recently released a free connector that our SAP customers can deploy on an existing or new SAP LaMa instance. It’s a potentially important contribution for enterprises that need to address the growing complexity associated with multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud application strategies.

Let’s take a look at how SAP LaMa works, how it fits into a customer’s SAP landscape, and what kinds of benefits they can expect. We’ll also run through some adjustments that SAP admins will need to make in order to launch the connector.

SAP LaMa: Bringing simplicity to SAP landscapes

The Google Cloud Connector for SAP LaMa is distributed as a Java archive — provided free of charge — that customers can deploy on a SAP LaMa system that already exists on premises, or on another cloud, or as part of a new SAP LaMa deployment on Google Cloud. SAP LaMa itself is a centralized SAP management tool designed to simplify, automate, and orchestrate a variety of management and administration tasks across your entire SAP landscape. Some examples of use cases for LaMa include:

• Getting a single, comprehensive overview of your organization’s full SAP landscape
• Automating day-to-day system administration tasks, like system refreshes
• Executing mass stop/start operations across your landscape
• Deploying custom operations and workflows within the SAP application environment

SAP admins can reclaim a significant amount of time by creating SAP context sensitive automation routines that can execute without human intervention, and by completing system maintenance tasks more quickly and consistently. SAP LaMa also elevates service quality by using automation to remove manual intervention (and thus human error) from the system admin process.

The Google Cloud Connector builds bridges for SAP customers

The Google Cloud connector functions as a trigger that extends LaMa functionality to SAP systems deployed on Google Cloud. The connector enables standard SAP LaMa execution scenarios, such as:

• Listing Google Cloud projects, zones, and VM instances within SAP LaMa’s landscape overview
• Mass stop/start of Google Compute Engine (GCE) instances, using either the SAP LaMa user interface or the scheduler
• System clone, copy, and DB refresh with Post Copy Automation
• Resizing of machine types
• Relocating SAP application instances to another VM instance
• SAP HANA failover to a replicated SAP HANA HA system  via the SAP Host Agent

By supporting native SAP automation and orchestration, the Google Cloud connector contributes to the overall value customers get from using SAP LaMa. What may be just as important, however, is how the connector makes life easier for customers running Google Cloud as part of a hybrid cloud or multi-cloud SAP landscape. That’s an increasingly important advantage, given recent research revealing that 82% of enterprises are currently deploying hybrid clouds.¹

Before getting started with the Google Cloud connector, it’s important to be aware that you’ll have to run it on SAP LaMa 3.0 (the current version), and that you will need to have an SAP Landscape Management – Enterprise Edition licence provided by SAP to support all functionality.

In addition, getting access to the full SAP LaMa feature set for your Google Cloud SAP environment will require you to deploy SAP systems using SAP’s adaptive design principles. These include:

• Using SID (SAP system ID) and instance-specific disk mount points
• Using alias IP for virtual host mapping and portability
• Configuring DNS to manage virtual hostname (aka. FQDN) for all VMs
• Using a local NFS host to manage shared files, as well as copying, migrating, and managing solutions like Filestore and NetApp separately

Because meeting these requirements may require altering your production systems, you’ll have to assess the pros and cons of doing so to take full advantage of the Google Cloud Connector.

Google Cloud is constantly looking for ways to support our SAP customers in running more efficiently and in making the most of their hybrid cloud and multi-cloud strategies. Releasing the Google Connector for SAP LaMa is one more reflection of our commitment to creating value for customers any way we can. Learn more about Google Cloud offerings for SAP customers.