Abstract:

Spanner is Google's globally distributed database, using atomic clocks, GPS, and a special time API to provide a consistent view of data spread over thousands of machines in many data centers. After a very high-level overview of how Spanner performs reads and writes, we will focus the talk on the challenges of testing this kind of system, and outline the main strategies we employ.

Bio:

James Corbett is a Staff Software Engineer in Test at Google, having been in the Storage Testing Group since 2006. He received his PhD from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1992 with a dissertation on software verification. He was a faculty member in the Department of Information and Computer Science at the University of Hawaii from 1992-2000.