Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google is IaaS, their PaaS offering (App Engine) never gained much traction AFAIK. I also find the comparison fair, Google is a software engineering company, Amazon is a sales/marketing company.
At what point do infrastructure services become the platform? IMO, between GKE, Spanner, BigQuery, etc., it's basically a PaaS for non-trivial applications.
Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service
381–390 of 456 posts
Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service
#382Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where is this 3-node minimum mentioned? URL please? Edit: Looks like maybe you're referring to the recommended 3 node minimum in production mentioned at https://cloud.google.com/spanner/docs/instance-configuration
While I'm not familiar with Spanner's inner workings, I would guess that they recommend 3 instances for quorum establishment in case a region becomes unreachable. If that's the case, using fewer than 3 instances could cause major problems.
Since Spanner currently only supports single-region deployments, it clearly isn't recommended as protection against a region becoming unavailable.
It may be recommended as protection against an availability issue on an instance, though, which is, after all, a big reason why you'd want a distributed DB in production.
Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service
#383I was like YES!!! Then I read for a single node it is 90 cents per hours then I was like NO!!! so absolute minimal cost for me is $648/month? I was hoping there was like a dev version. Maybe I didn't read the fine print?
Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service
#384Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dumb question: Since strings are supported, couldn't you just store some JSON as a string? Or are you talking about supporting queries that involve parsing the JSON on the "server"?
Not dumb, I was being inexact. I was talking about Spanner understanding the semantics of JSON, similar to Postgre's JSONB or MYSQL's JSON.
I think the OP was saying "dumb question" as in "I have a dumb question" rather than "this is a dumb question". At least that's the context I inferred.
Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service
#385Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google has to support Google, Youtube and many of the most resources intensive services in existence on Earth. They needed to be "efficient enough" to operate that, meaning incredibly efficient. Amazon runs nothing, it's an outsourcing firm. They needed to make services "good enough" to be sold. If a service is somewhat inefficient, it just charges the clients more to cover the costs. Technologies reflect the busines…
> Amazon runs nothing, it's an outsourcing firm. What the fuck are you talking about. It's one thing to say AWS services are "good enough" but "Amazon runs nothing" is a ridiculous statement.
Agreed, and I work on Google Cloud. We may have different styles and core businesses, but I wouldn't say "eBay ran nothing" either. Logistics alone is a super fascinating space!
Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service
#386Congratulations to the Spanner team for becoming part of the Google public cloud! And for those wondering, this is why Oracle wants billions of dollars from Google for "Java Copyright Infringement" because the only growth market for Oracle right now is their hosted database service, and whoops Google has a better one now. It will be interesting if Amazon and Microsoft choose to compete with Google on this service. If…
>the only growth market for Oracle right now is their hosted database service, and whoops Google has a better one now It could end up that way, but lacking INSERT and UPDATE will likely limit this to a niche market for now.
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Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service
#387Earlier quoted context omitted.
> One day running your own servers will be like running your own ISP . Massively impractical because the free market has been manipulated to the point that it effectively no longer exists What? People use cloud computing because it already is massively impractical to run your own servers . Hardware is hard to run and scale on your own and experiences economies of scale. This principle is seen everywhere and can hardl…
Have you run your own servers in a colo? I've done it myself. One person, with maybe 3 hours a week of time investment after a few weeks of setup and hardware purchase. Using containers I can move between the cloud and my own servers seamlessly, and long as I never bite the golden apple and use any of the cloud's walled garden "services" like S3. If I need more power I can spin up some temporary servers at any cloud…
Did you ever read about how Netflix tried to run their own hardware but can't because they have so much data in AWS that it would basically bankrupt them to extract it?
Where did you read this? You can have Amazon send you a truck full of hard drives. I doubt it costs more than Netflix can afford.
Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service
#388Some interesting stuff in https://cloud.google.com/spanner/docs/whitepapers/SpannerAnd... about the social aspects of high availability. 1. Defining high availability in terms of how a system is used: "In turn, the real litmus test is whether or not users (that want their own service to be highly available) write the code to handle outage exceptions: if they haven’t written that code, then they are assuming high avai…
> perceived safety ... driving I became a way better winter driver when I started intentionally fishtailing in snow and ice (in low risk situations).
I experienced this in Drivers' Ed with special tires that were deflatable and inflatable under instructor control! Until I moved for grad school, I hadn't realized this wasn't more common.
Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service
#389Is it hosted on Google or NSA servers?
Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service
#390Earlier quoted context omitted.
Amazon's Aurora databases seem to be solving the same problem, and are MySQL or Postgres compatible to boot.
It is not close to equivalent. But I do want to get a better feel for if Google really has figured how to do basically the impossible. I want to see if this truly scales horizontally but of it does then competitors better hope for a much more detailed paper :)
> It is not close to equivalent.
It's equivalent, with different (unknown) constraints. Aurora is specifically for scaling workloads in the same way. You can say it's horizontal (machine) over vertical (resource) but it's all a matter of accounting.
The big nono is the Spanner pricepoint. I will stick with Aurora for scaling based on traffic I use, over pricey timeslices.
You would have to have quite a load to justify the switch from cheaper de jour solutions right now (AWS). Relying on the few that do, is a risk.