Google has launched the public beta of Google Cloud Spanner distributed relational database, taking aim at rival Amazon Web Services in the public cloud.
The new database will compete against Amazon RDS and Azure SQL Database in the public cloud segment.
Google Cloud Spanner will expand its Database as a Service (DBaaS) portfolio, complementing the already existing services like NoSQL and RDBMS, which it offers through the Google Cloud Platform.
It will also complement the company’s existing database offerings like Cloud SQL, BigTable, BigQuery and Datastore.
Google Cloud Spanner is a database which combines both the features of a traditional relational database management systems (RDBMS) and NoSQL services.
The combination brings the advantages of a relational database including atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability (ACID) transactions, relational schemas and SQL queries.
At the same time, similar to NoSQL, it can be scaled horizontally to hundreds of servers for handling transactional workloads. The cloud platform offers automatic scaling, synchronous data replication and node redundancy.
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Cloud Spanner will be fully managed and built for cloud guaranteeing high available for applications, freeing IT resources to focus on application logic instead of spending time in managing hardware and software, Google claims.
Development of Cloud Spanner started out in 2007, when a team of system engineers 
and researchers from Google set out to find an optimum solution between relational database models and NoSQL solutions.
In 2012, the Spanner research paper was published which described the achievements of the new system. Google claims that for some years, it has been internally testing Spanner with hundreds of different applications and petabytes of data across data centres around the world.
Cloud Spanner is claimed to be supporting tens of millions of queries per second and runs some of Google’s services including AdWords and Google Play.
As a managed service, the cloud service offers several benefits for database administrators to focus on application logic instead of spending time managing hardware and software.
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Cloud Spanner product manager Deepti Srivastava said in blog post: “With Cloud Spanner, your database scales up and down as needed, and you’ll only pay for what you use. It features a simple pricing model that charges for compute node-hours, actual storage consumption (no pre-provisioning) and external network access.
“Cloud Spanner keeps application development simple by supporting standard tools and languages in a familiar relational database environment. It’s ideal for operational workloads supported by traditional relational databases, including inventory management, financial transactions and control systems that are outgrowing those systems.
“It supports distributed transactions, schemas and DDL statements, SQL queries and JDBC drivers and offers client libraries for the most popular languages, including Java, Go, Python and Node.js.”
