Google launches beta of Cloud Spanner, a managed version of its internal database

Google today is announcing the launch of Cloud Spanner, a new managed database service that people can use through the Google Cloud Platform.
The service is an implementation of the Spanner software that Google documented in a paper in 2012 and has been using internally for years. Google did something similar when it introduced Google Cloud Bigtable database service in 2015, nine years after the publication of the Bigtable paper. And before Bigtable, there was the 2014 launch of Google Container