Two problems. The name is a nightmare for any large company. Countless people have brought this up and the dev team is apparently deaf to the issue. Idiots.
The second major issue is technical. Building something like Spanner requires a very accurate time source that absolutely will not skew. Ever. This is how Google avoids partitions and essentially breaks CAP theory. Perfect time gives you globally accurate timestamps without exchanging data. Distributed transactions without locks or shared state, just usually benign contention.
They're not that hard to build, just no demand. Possibly some issues with ITAR preventing such accurate clocks from becoming commodity hardware? It could easily lead to extremely accurate IMU's which are definitely limited. Not sure, but that's what I ran into researching fibre optic gyros. Atomic clocks could probably be built on SMT scale for a few cents IMO.
As usual, it seems Google is already doing this and has been for years. We either need to wait for the trickle down that Google thankfully does after about 5 years... Or get some deep pocketed tech behemoth to foot the bill for everyone else
Leveraging accurate clocks doesn't let Google ignore partitions. "TrueTime itself could be hindered by a partition"[0]. Spanner also uses two-phase commits and locking, which are unavailable under certain kinds of network partitions.
From their 2017 paper on Spanner and CAP:
> To the extent there is anything special, it is really Google’s wide-area network, plus many years of operational improvements, that greatly limit partitions in practice, and thus enable high availability.
