Spanner is a distributed SQL database management and storage service developed by Google. It provides features such as global transactions, strongly consistent reads, and automatic multi-site replication and failover. Spanner is used in Google F1, the database for its advertising business Google Ads, as well as Gmail and Google Photos.

Google data centers are the large data center facilities Google uses to provide their services, which combine large drives, computer nodes organized in aisles of racks, internal and external networking, environmental controls, and operations software.