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Spanner's Architecture

Explore Spanner's architecture, learning about its components like zone managers, spanservers, and placement drivers. Understand its replication strategy using Paxos groups, leader-follower roles, and how it supports distributed transactions through two-phase commits. This lesson helps you grasp the design principles that ensure Spanner's availability, consistency, and performance across distributed systems.

Components of Spanner

A Spanner deployment is called a universe.

Universe

Universe consists of a set of zones, which are the units of administrative deployment, physical isolation, and replication (e.g. datacenters).

Each zone has a zone manager and hundreds to several thousand spanservers.

Zone manager

The zone manager assigns data to spanservers.

Spanservers

Spanservers read/write requests from clients and store data.

Location proxies

The per-zone location proxies are used by clients to locate the spanservers that serve a specific portion of ...