f:["$","div",null,{"className":"max-w-4xl mx-auto py-8","children":[["$","script",null,{"type":"application/ld+json","dangerouslySetInnerHTML":{"__html":"{\"@context\":\"https://schema.org\",\"@type\":\"BlogPosting\",\"headline\":\"Whitepapers: Spanner\",\"description\":\"Google's paper on Spanner\",\"datePublished\":\"2025-12-17\",\"dateModified\":\"2025-12-17\",\"author\":{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"name\":\"Brandon Shoop\",\"url\":\"https://brandonshoop.com\"},\"publisher\":{\"@type\":\"Organization\",\"name\":\"Brandon Shoop\",\"logo\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"url\":\"https://brandonshoop.com/siteicon.png\"}},\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https://brandonshoop.com/blog/spanner\"}}"}}],["$","script",null,{"type":"application/ld+json","dangerouslySetInnerHTML":{"__html":"{\"@context\":\"https://schema.org\",\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https://brandonshoop.com\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"Blog\",\"item\":\"https://brandonshoop.com/blog\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":3,\"name\":\"Spanner\",\"item\":\"https://brandonshoop.com/blog/spanner\"}]}"}}],["$","div",null,{"className":"bg-white p-6 rounded-lg shadow","children":[["$","h1",null,{"className":"text-3xl font-bold mb-2","children":"Whitepapers: Spanner"}],["$","div",null,{"className":"text-sm text-gray-500 mb-4","children":[["$","time",null,{"dateTime":"2025-12-17T00:00:00.000Z","children":"December 17, 2025"}],["$","span",null,{"className":"ml-2","children":"By Brandon Shoop"}]]}],["$","article",null,{"className":"prose max-w-none","dangerouslySetInnerHTML":{"__html":"

Spanner

Link to paper

TL;DR

I recently read Google's paper on Spanner. It helped me build better mental models around the challenges of distributed systems. Its biggest invention / callout is the \"TrueTime API\". Effectively, this api is a centralized clock that all transactions reach out to for timestamps. This alleviates the microsecond differences between the clocks in physical hardware and allows externally consistent timestamps.

\n"}}]]}]]}]