Question

A logistics company runs a globally distributed inventory system on Cloud Spanner. During regional promotional events, read and write throughput spikes unpredictably, and engineers currently adjust the instance's node count manually. This has led to over-provisioning during quiet periods and latency violations when they react too slowly to spikes. They want the database capacity to adjust to load automatically while keeping utilization within target thresholds. What should the architect recommend?

Accepted Answer

Enable the Cloud Spanner Autoscaler by configuring managed autoscaling with minimum and maximum processing units and a target utilization percentage.

Answer

Migrate the workload to Cloud SQL with read replicas and enable the built-in storage autoscaling feature.

Answer

Create a Cloud Scheduler job that increases node count every morning and decreases it every night regardless of live traffic.

Answer

Enable Spanner's point-in-time recovery and increase the default query timeout to absorb the latency spikes.