Game on with Spanner: How Playstation achieves global scale with 91% less storage, 50% lower costs

Every time you boot up your PlayStation and your game library loads — every Final Fantasy title, every Crash Bandicoot remaster, every indie gem you impulse-bought at 2 A.M. — there's a system working behind the scenes to confirm you own what you own. Sony Interactive Entertainment calls this the Entitlements service. It covers more than 350 million accounts and supports services that drive billions of dollars in revenue. While Playstation has many eager fans, they also have limited time and attention and low switching costs. Entitlements has to be consistent, instant, and always available, ensuring them game access without sacrificing accuracy or security for Sony. Sony Interactive recently rebuilt Entitlements from the ground up on Google Cloud Spanner , cutting storage by 91%, reducing costs by half (~48%), and completing the entire migration with zero downtime on a live production system. In this post, we’ll share how we managed to beat our own high scores and expectations for what