Simulate a failed Cloud Spanner node or replica

Question

I have a need to demonstrate what happens when a failed replica or node occurs. I know Spanner is a managed service and we trust its availability, but how can I simulate a failed a failed node or replica?

Also, is there a method to return a value that identifies the unique node a given query was executed against? I tried this API call, but it does not return any info on which Spanner node served the request. https://cloud.google.com/spanner/docs/reference/rest/v1/projects.instances.databases.sessions/list

Answer 1

There is no way to simulate a failed node or replica since those events are transparent to the user and the service still remains up. Similarly the API does not return any information on which node served the query. A query might be executed across multiple nodes and this is something we do not expect users to think about when using cloud spanner. Do you have any specific use case for needing this information?

thanks Vikas