If you want more detail, this article links a research paper that describes the system in detail. Very clever focussing on the timebase as a way to improve dist

If you want more detail, this article links a research paper that describes the system in detail. Very clever focussing on the timebase as a way to improve distributed consistency; I'd always assumed NTP was sufficient. http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/research.google.com/en/us/archive/spanner-osdi2012.pdf http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrust... The part of the article that stood out to me is that Spanner is used in F1, the new backend datastore for AdWords. That's a significant vote of confidence.