It might also be worth pointing out that 'node' does not reference underlying server. In a PG or similar architecture, node might be used to specify how many "

It might also be worth pointing out that 'node' does not reference underlying server. In a PG or similar architecture, node might be used to specify how many "nodes" are in a replicated setup for high availability purposes. In Spanner, "Node" is a measure of compute capacity (as is the finer-grain processing units) allowing you to scale up/down without impacting an application's workload. All instances get high availability regardless of number of nodes or processing units, and the specifics of this are handled by the configuration.