Today, we announced the preview of Spanner Omni, a downloadable version of Spanner, that expands its industry-leading distributed database capabilities beyond Google Cloud. This enables enterprises to run Spanner in their own data centers, across clouds, or on a laptop — bringing its virtually unlimited scalability, high availability, strong consistency, enterprise-grade security, and multi-model capabilities to AI-enabled applications wherever they operate.
Why Spanner Omni is a big deal
Over a decade ago, Google pioneered the distributed SQL market with Spanner. It offered the “holy grail” combination: the horizontal scalability of NoSQL with the ACID (atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability) compliance and strong consistency of a traditional relational database. Since then, Spanner has evolved into an interoperable multimodal database, incorporating SQL, graph, key-value, full-text search, vector search, and analytical processing with columnar engine. This evolution offers the capabilities needed for the AI era and promises an opportunity to simplify and consolidate customers’ workloads — an advancement that has delivered significant value to our customers.
Customers often navigate across a range of IT environments, from public cloud and hybrid cloud to air-gapped deployments. Spanner Omni meets them where they operate to address the evolving needs of modern enterprises, including:
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Business continuity: Mission-critical workloads often need truly resilient, high-availability architectures that extend beyond the edge of the cloud. These workloads need to keep running even when business conditions or world events compel changes in their cloud posture.
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Regulatory compliance: Customers in highly-regulated industries, like financial services, must meet regulatory requirements like data sovereignty. While many still maintain large on-premises footprints to stay compliant, they’re eager to modernize for the agentic era.
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Application portability: For SaaS providers and other independent software vendors (ISVs), growth depends on meeting customers wherever they are — whether in different clouds or a private data center. They want a consistent technology stack across those environments to minimize development and operational overhead without having to compromise on advanced features for innovation.
Introducing Spanner Omni
Spanner Omni delivers the same core capabilities as our fully-managed Spanner service, with the added freedom to deploy it wherever needed. It provides flexible configuration options ranging from virtual machines (VMs) and Linux containers to Kubernetes clusters. Customers can also run Spanner Omni in a wide range of configurations — on-premises, multicloud, multi-region and hybrid (within reasonable latency topologies), air-gapped, or connected — scaling from a single machine to clusters of thousands of servers. Our internal benchmark tests confirm that Spanner Omni processes millions of queries per second (QPS) across petabytes of data in a single regional deployment.
