Improving Postgres is solid and boring.

Solid and boring is often a good choice. I'm glad to see startups in this space.

What's the latest on adoption of Spanner-like databases?

This was on HN a few months back: https://github.com/losfair/mvsqlite

While not Spanner, it is essentially an open source db like AlloyDB or Aurora, pushing replication and scale out to the storage layer (in this case via FoundationDB). The most interesting bit of mvsqlite is it's multi-writer capabilities, using FoundationDB to perform page-level locks.

I'm neither the creator nor using it in production, but I'd love to see more DBs using FoundationDB as storage. It's a pretty cool solution.

The lead developer on mvsqlite has since joined Deno...