Cloud Spanner for global distribution in GCP - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Cloud Spanner for global distribution

📖 Scenario: You are building a globally distributed application that requires a highly available and scalable database. Google Cloud Spanner is a perfect choice because it offers strong consistency and global distribution.In this project, you will create a Cloud Spanner instance, configure a database with a table, and set up multi-region replication to ensure your data is available worldwide.

🎯 Goal: Create a Cloud Spanner instance with a multi-region configuration, define a database schema with a table, and configure the instance for global distribution.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a Cloud Spanner instance named global-instance with a multi-region configuration nam6 (North America multi-region).

Create a database named customer-db inside the instance.

Define a table named Customers with columns CustomerId (STRING(36), primary key), Name (STRING(100)), and Country (STRING(50)).

Configure the instance to use 3 nodes for capacity.

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Global applications like e-commerce, financial services, and gaming require databases that are fast, consistent, and available worldwide. Cloud Spanner provides this capability with multi-region replication.

💼 Career

Cloud architects and database administrators use Cloud Spanner to design scalable, globally distributed databases that support mission-critical applications with strong consistency and high availability.

1

Create Cloud Spanner instance

Create a Cloud Spanner instance named global-instance with the configuration nam6 and 3 nodes.

GCP

# Your code here to create the Cloud Spanner instance named global-instance

Need a hint?

Use the gcloud spanner instances create command with the correct instance name, configuration, and node count.

2

Create Cloud Spanner database

Create a database named customer-db inside the Cloud Spanner instance global-instance.

GCP

gcloud spanner instances create global-instance --config=nam6 --description="Global multi-region instance" --nodes=3
# Your code here to create the database customer-db inside global-instance

Need a hint?

Use the gcloud spanner databases create command with the correct database name and instance.

3

Define Customers table schema

Define a table named Customers with columns CustomerId (STRING(36), primary key), Name (STRING(100)), and Country (STRING(50)) using a DDL statement. Use the gcloud spanner databases ddl update command to apply this schema to the customer-db database in the global-instance instance.

GCP

gcloud spanner instances create global-instance --config=nam6 --description="Global multi-region instance" --nodes=3
gcloud spanner databases create customer-db --instance=global-instance
# Your code here to define the Customers table schema using DDL

Need a hint?

Use the gcloud spanner databases ddl update command with a DDL string to create the table.

4

Verify instance configuration for global distribution

Verify that the Cloud Spanner instance global-instance is configured with the multi-region configuration nam6 and has 3 nodes allocated.

GCP

gcloud spanner instances create global-instance --config=nam6 --description="Global multi-region instance" --nodes=3
gcloud spanner databases create customer-db --instance=global-instance
gcloud spanner databases ddl update customer-db --instance=global-instance --ddl="CREATE TABLE Customers (CustomerId STRING(36) NOT NULL, Name STRING(100), Country STRING(50)) PRIMARY KEY (CustomerId)"
# Your code here to verify the instance configuration

Need a hint?

Use the gcloud spanner instances describe command to check the instance details.