Cloud Spanner minimun nodes

[fbermeoq]

Hi all

We have a prospect lead with an e-commerce solution with shopping and deliveries items functionality from their web platform. They have stores and markets retail in some countries in LATAM. We are analyzing an architecture using Cloud Spanner database, they have 2MM of requests from their e-commerce web each day. Please, can you guide me according your experience ¿What are the minimum of Spanner nodes to configure on each instance?

Thanks in advance

[robertcarlos · Accepted solution]

Hi @fbermeoq,

Welcome to Google Cloud Community!

According to this documentation on compute capacity, nodes and processing units 

When you create an instance, you specify its compute capacity as a number of processing units or as a number of nodes, with 1000 processing units being equal to 1 node.

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This means that a minimum of 1 node (or 1000 processing units or 4 TB) is allotted once the instance is created.

You may also define your instance with less than 1000 processing units which are good for smaller data sizes, queries, and workloads. However they have limited compute resources and may result in non-linear scaling and performance for some workloads, and may experience intermittent increase in latencies.

As detailed in Quotas & limits, to provide high availability and low latency for accessing a database, Spanner defines storage limits based on the compute capacity of an instance:

• For instances smaller than 1 node (1000 processing units), Spanner allots 409.6 GB of data for every 100 processing units in the database.
• For instances of 1 node and larger, Spanner allots 4 TB of data for each node.