This isn't entirely accurate. BigTable was Google's earlier cloud database, and it's certainly non-traditional, and you have to build your application without t

This isn't entirely accurate. BigTable was Google's earlier cloud database, and it's certainly non-traditional, and you have to build your application without traditional consistency guarantees, the way you describe. Spanner doesn't exactly hide the details, but it lets you make transactions that span multiple shards. You still eat the cost of the transaction, you're just free from having to implement it at the application level, which is a more difficult and error-prone way of doing things. The bottom line is that if you need consistency, it needs to be implemented somewhere in your stack. If you don't need consistency (analytics workloads come to mind) then you have more flexibility with your database. Disclosure: Google employee, reconstructing what I know from published information.