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Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

cloudplatform.googleblog.com

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Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#41

Post by theDoug »

runeks wrote: post #27

I wonder why they charge a minimum of $0.90 per node-hour when they offer VMs for as little as $0.008/hr. This is hugely useful even for single-person startups, so why charge a minimum of ~$8,000 per year?

Hugely useful but also hugely different from an engineering/coverage perspective, perhaps.

Companies with more data than can fit in a single-instance RDBMS system (like >3TB of hot data, more throughput than a single node can handle) but still seeking transactional consistency are a clear use case. Single-person startups could definitely benefit, but it's a less-likely scenario that they would require the level of coverage Spanner provides.

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#42

Post by justinblat »

tdrd wrote: post #30

Doesn't seem possible to use this yet. No client libraries and no samples: https://cloud.google.com/spanner/docs/tutorials Have they documented the wire protocol? I couldn't find it.

We're still working on rolling a few docs throughout the day. For example - here's the node.js lib:

https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/google-cloud-node#clo...

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#43

Post by andrewguenther »

runeks wrote: post #27

I wonder why they charge a minimum of $0.90 per node-hour when they offer VMs for as little as $0.008/hr. This is hugely useful even for single-person startups, so why charge a minimum of ~$8,000 per year?

Why should useful things be cheap?

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#44

Post by bradgalina4eva »

runeks wrote: post #27

I wonder why they charge a minimum of $0.90 per node-hour when they offer VMs for as little as $0.008/hr. This is hugely useful even for single-person startups, so why charge a minimum of ~$8,000 per year?

It's innovative. Cost != value.

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#45

Post by amaks »

cipherzero wrote: post #22
cipherzero wrote: post #13

The white paper is available here: http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.co... for anyone interested

Oh and the newer white paper from today: https://cloud.google.com/spanner/docs/whitepapers/SpannerAnd...

I bet there will be a lot about CAP theorem in the comments:-)

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#46

Post by otterley »

runeks wrote: post #27

I wonder why they charge a minimum of $0.90 per node-hour when they offer VMs for as little as $0.008/hr. This is hugely useful even for single-person startups, so why charge a minimum of ~$8,000 per year?

Because you're paying not for cost plus, but value added. To make a meaningful cost comparison, the best alternative must be considered, which is you spending your own labor to engineer and build a similar system yourself.

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#47

Post by karlding »

I wonder how this will affect adoption of CockroachDB [1], which was inspired by Spanner and supposedly an open source equivalent. I'd imagine that Spanner is a rather compelling choice, since they don't have to host it themselves. As far as I know, CockroachDB currently does not support providing CockroachDB as a service (but it is on their roadmap) [2].

[1] https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/frequently-asked-question...

[2] https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/frequently-asked-question...

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#48

Post by havermeyer »

koolba wrote: post #39
tedd4u wrote: post #33

The team here at Quizlet did a lot of performance testing on Spanner with one of our MySQL workloads to see if it's an option for us. Here are the test results: https://quizlet.com/blog/quizlet-cloud-spanner

What's the SQL and wire compatibility level? MySQL? EDIT: Found quite a bit of my answers in your linked article: > Cloud Spanner uses a SQL dialect which matches the ANSI SQL:2011 standard with some extensions for Spanner-specific features. This is a SQL standard simpler than that used in non-distributed databases such as vanilla MySQL, but still supports the relational model (e.g. JOINs). It includes data-definitio…

It has the same basis as standard SQL in BigQuery: https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs/reference/standard-sq...

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#50

Post by devopsproject »

runeks wrote: post #27

I wonder why they charge a minimum of $0.90 per node-hour when they offer VMs for as little as $0.008/hr. This is hugely useful even for single-person startups, so why charge a minimum of ~$8,000 per year?

A cheap VM is not likely to give the same type of performance.
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