Cloud Spanner
What is it
Cloud Spanner is a fully managed, distributed, relational database with support for multi-region replication.
When to use it
Use Cloud Spanner as the go-to choice for an operational database to provide persistence for a backend service.
App-specific instances
In accordance with the app-specific projects technique, use granular instance sizing to create a Spanner cluster specific to your application of an appropriate size.
Managed backups
When setting up a new sure to also configure managed backups.
How to learn it
Even though Cloud Spanner is an SQL-compliant relational database, it is implemented by a distributed storage system, which means that it's of the utmost importance to read the documentation to understand how to make use of this database in the best way.
Of extra importance are the best practices on how to design a schema that works well with the distributed database architecture of Cloud Spanner, as well as how to how to write efficient SQL queries.