Cloud Spanner Emulator Reaches 1.0 Milestone!

The Cloud Spanner emulator provides application developers with the full set of APIs, including the full breadth of SQL and DDL features that can be run locally for prototyping, development and testing. This offline emulator is free and improves developer productivity for customers. Today, we are happy to announce that Cloud Spanner emulator is generally available (GA) with support for Partitioned APIs, Cloud Spanner client libraries, and SQL features.

Since Cloud Spanner emulator’s beta launch in April, 2020, we have seen strong adoption of the local emulator from customers of Cloud Spanner. Several new and existing customers adopted the emulator in their development & continuous test pipelines. They noticed significant improvements in developer productivity, speed of test execution, and error-free applications deployed to production. We also added several features in this release based on the valuable feedback we received from beta users. The full list of features is documented in the GitHub readme.

Partition APIs

When reading or querying large amounts of data from Cloud Spanner, it can be useful to divide the query into smaller pieces, or partitions, and use multiple machines to fetch the partitions in parallel. The emulator now supports Partition Read, Partition Query, and Partition DML APIs.

Cloud Spanner client libraries

With the GA launch, the latest versions of all the Cloud Spanner client libraries support the emulator. We have added support for C#, Node.js, PHP, Python, Ruby client libraries and the Cloud Spanner JDBC driver. This is in addition to C++, Go and Java client libraries that were already supported with the beta launch. Be sure to check out the minimum version for each of the client libraries that support the emulator.

Use the Getting Started guides to try the emulator with the client library of your choice.

SQL features

Emulator now supports the full set of SQL features provided by Cloud Spanner. Some of the notable additions being support for SQL functions JSON_VALUE, JSON_QUERY, CEILING, POWER, CHARACTER_LENGTH, and FORMAT. We now also support untyped parameter bindings in SQL statements which are used by our client libraries written in languages with dynamic typing e.g., Python, PHP, Node.js and Ruby.

Using Emulator in CI/CD pipelines

You may now point the majority of your existing CI/CD to the Cloud Spanner emulator instead of a real Cloud Spanner instance brought up on GCP. This will save you both cost and time, since an emulator instance comes up instantly and is free to use!

What’s even better is that you can bring up multiple instances in a single execution of the emulator, and of course multiple databases. Thus, tests that interact with a Cloud Spanner database can now run in parallel since each of them can have their own database, making tests hermetic. This can reduce flakiness in unit tests and reduce the number of bugs that can make their way to continuous integration tests or to production.

In case your existing CI/CD architecture assumes the existence of a Cloud Spanner test instance and/or test database against which the tests run, you can achieve similar functionality with the emulator as well. Note that the emulator doesn’t come up with a default instance or a default database as we expect users to create instances and databases as required in their tests for hermeticity as explained above. Below are two examples of how you can bring up an emulator with a default instance or database: 1) By using a docker image or 2) Programmatically.

Starting Emulator from Docker

The emulator can be started using Docker on Linux, MacOS, and Windows. As a prerequisite, you would need to install Docker on your system. To bring up an emulator with a default database/instance, you can execute a shell script in your docker file to do so. Such a script would make RPC calls to CreateInstance and CreateDatabase after bringing up the emulator server. You can also look at this example on how to put this together when using docker.

Run Emulator Programmatically

You can bring up the emulator binary in the same process as your test program. Then you can then create a default instance/database in your ‘Setup’ and clean up the same when the tests are over. Note that the exact procedure for bringing up an ‘in-process’ service may vary with the client library language and platform of your choice.

Other alternatives to start the emulator, including pre-built linux binaries, are listed here.
Try it now

Learn more about Google Cloud Spanner emulator and try it out now.

By Asheesh Agrawal, Google Open Source

The Tekton Pipelines Beta release

Tekton is a powerful and flexible open-source framework for creating CI/CD systems, allowing developers to build, test, and deploy across cloud providers and on-premise systems. The project recently released its Beta, which creates higher levels of stability by bringing the best features into the Pipelines Beta and creates more trust between the users and the features.

Tekton is used for infrastructure development on top of Kubernetes; it provides an open source framework for creating CI/CD systems, easily allowing developers to build, test, and deploy applications across applications.

With the new Beta functionality, users can rest assured that Beta features will not be removed, and that there will be a 9-month window dedicated to finding solutions for incompatible API changes. Since many in the Tekton community are using Tekton Pipelines to run APIs, this new release helps guarantee that any new developments on top of Tekton are reliable and optimized for best performance, with a budget of several months to make any necessary adjustments.

As platform builders require a stable API and feature set, the Beta launch includes Tasks, ClusterTasks and TaskRuns, Pipelines and PipelineRuns, to provide a foundation that users can rely on. Google created working groups in conjunction with other contributors from various companies to drive the Beta release. The team continues to churn out new Pipeline features towards a GA launch at the end of the year, while also focussing on bringing other components like metadata storage, Triggers, and the Catalog to Beta.

While initially starting as part of the Knative project from Google, in collaboration with developers from other organizations, Tekton was donated to the Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF) in early 2019. Tekton’s initial design for the interface was even inspired by the Cloud Build API—and to this day—Google remains heavily involved in the commitment to develop Tekton, by participating in the governing board, and staffing a dedicated team invested in the success of this project. These characteristics make Tekton a prime example of a collaboration in open source.

Since its launch in February 2019, Tekton has had 3712 pull requests from 262 contributors across 39 companies spanning 16 countries. Many widely used projects across the open source industry are built on Tekton:

• Puppet Project Nebula
• Jenkins X
• Red Hat OpenShift Pipelines
• IBM Cloud Continuous Delivery
• Kabanero – open source project led by IBM
• Rio – open source project led by Rancher
• Kf – open source project led by Google

Interested in trying out Tekton yourself? To install Tekton in your own kubernetes cluster (1.15 or newer), use kubectl to install the latest Tekton release:

kubectl apply -f

https://storage.googleapis.com/tekton-releases/pipeline/latest/release.yaml

You can jump right in by saving this Task to a file called task.yaml:

apiVersion: tekton.dev/v1beta1
kind: Task
metadata:
  name: hello-world
spec:

  steps:
  - image: ubuntu
    script: |
      echo "hello world"

Tasks are one of the most important building blocks of Tekton! Head over to tektoncd/catalog for more examples of reusable Tasks.

To run the hello-world Task, first apply it to your cluster with kubectl:

kubectl apply -f task.yaml

The easiest way to start running our Task is to use the Tekton command line tool, tkn. Install tkn using the right method for your OS, and you can run your Task with:

tkn task start hello-world --showlog

That’s just a taste of Tekton! At tekton.dev/try the community is hard at work adding interactive tutorials that let you try Tekton in a virtual environment. And you can dump straight into the docs at tekton.dev/docs and join the Tekton community at github.com/tektoncd/community.

Congratulations to all the contributors who made this Beta release possible!

By Radha Jhatakia and Christie Wilson, Google Open Source