Distributed SQL and NewSQL Architectures: Google Spanner, CockroachDB, TiDB, and Amazon Aurora — Separating Compute, Consensus, and Storage

Deep End Era. Engineering with Sankalp · Oct 29, 2026 · 1h 10m

When an undersea fiber-optic cable snaps outside Singapore, an asynchronously replicated primary-replica database either stalls or loses committed payments on failover, while a manually sharded database lets cross-shard reads see effects before their causes. To see how modern databases solve multi-node survival and scale, we compare the four flagship architectures of Distributed and Cloud-Native SQL: Google Spanner, CockroachDB, TiDB, and Amazon Aurora.

Chapters

00:00:00 Cold Open: The Subsea Cable Cut and the Missing Eleven Million Dollars

00:04:50 The Two Forking Paths of Modern Cloud and…