Google Cloud Spanner
Google Cloud Spanner is a fully managed, globally distributed, and strongly consistent relational database service offered by Google Cloud. It combines the benefits of traditional relational databases (like SQL support and ACID transactions) with the horizontal scalability and high availability of NoSQL systems, making it suitable for mission-critical applications requiring global consistency. It automatically handles sharding, replication, and failover across multiple regions.
Developers should use Google Cloud Spanner when building applications that demand high scalability, strong consistency, and global availability, such as financial systems, e-commerce platforms, or real-time inventory management. It is ideal for scenarios where traditional relational databases become bottlenecks due to scaling limitations, and where NoSQL databases' eventual consistency is insufficient for transactional integrity across distributed data.