The article makes mention of Aurora and Spanner as inspiration; did CosmosDB not exist yet? I realize Cosmos is really more of a document database but given its ability to be queried with SQL in addition to massive horizontal scale and global replication seems like it should be more or less in the discussion.

Reference to querying Cosmos with SQL: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cosmos-db/how-to-sql-...