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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

#391

Post by therealmarv »

sebringj wrote: post #383

I 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?

I was thinking the same thing! Maybe it's better to look into some smaller service which offer e.g. PostgreSQL as a Service like https://www.elephantsql.com/plans.html or https://www.databaselabs.io/pricing/ (I'm sure they are even more, just done a quick googling). Does somebody has experience with such services?

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#392

Post by inlined »

dragonwriter wrote: post #382
edaemon wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Even within a single region you can put three nodes in different zones.

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#393

Post by tazjin »

tybit wrote: post #373
tazjin wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly don't think Amazon is even close to Google. How much more infrastructure do they have besides AWS? How much does Google have besides GCP?

That's ignoring just how much larger AWS is than GCP.

Sure, but those are the public offerings - the largest part of Google's infrastructure is not public.

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#394

Post by mavelikara »

computerex wrote: post #362
jplahn wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do realize the way most services get into AWS is that they're first built in the retail side of Amazon (without any thought towards AWS) and then once people realize it's effectively solving an actual problem, it's rebuilt for AWS. Having to support Amazon retail is a pretty demanding stress test -- I'm not sure why you're getting this notion that Amazon doesn't run anything. I should think handling Black Friday…

No one is saying amazon doesn't test their stuff. The argument here is that Google is inherently a more technical company, which is a fair comparison. Their products are more technical. Ad Sense, Gmail, YouTube are incredibly technical products due to their scale, and the argument here is that nothing of similar technicality exists in Amazon's core business, which I think is totally fair.

> The argument here is that Google is inherently a more technical company, which is a fair comparison.

I suspect that Google knows this, and their reputation for have poor customer support and sales comes from that knowledge.

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#395

Post by acchow »

scarmig wrote: post #128
tazjin wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main sales pitch of Cloud Spanner is Google's network infrastructure. No startup will be able to replicate that anytime soon, a lot of time (and money) has been put into it by a lot of people over a long time.

Curious: is there any company in the world that could replicate its breadth, performance, and reliability in the next decade? Could any government? Has any government? My impression is that, infrastructure wise, Google is genuinely in a class of size one.

> Could any government?

NSA's annual budget is $50bn. U.S. military budget is about $600bn.

Google's revenue is $90bn and they don't spend all of it.

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#396

Post by detaro »

throwawaydbfif wrote: post #369
stuckagain wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cassandra is sort of a Bigtable without transactions. It is not comparable to Spanner at all.

Spanner is unique in a lot of ways, but it still trades off consistency for speed. The most unique thing about spanner is the use of globally synchronized clock timestamps to guarantee "comes before" consistency without the need to actually synchronize everything. There is nothing stopping startups and open source developers from building the same thing in a few years. The missing ingredient is highly stable GPS and…

> This is a new piece of hardware

Only "new" in the sense that it is currently not commonly offered, the devices themselves have been available for ages. (If you are a large enough customer you apparently can get at least some colo-facilities to provide you with the roof-access and cabling needed for the antennas). If cloud providers make precise time available I don't see much potential for locking you in with their specific way of providing it, as long as it ends up as precise system time in some way.

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#397

Post by sandGorgon »

dragonwriter wrote: post #376
sandGorgon wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RDS is not single node - its multi-AZ replicated. And that's what we are paying 300$ instead of 99$ for. Imagine.. RDS is literally the ONLY place where you can buy a 10 GB data multi-AZ replicated, snapshotted and managed postgresql. Its pretty much a monopoly, now that Google seems to have officially closed the book on ever supporting postgresql.

> Its pretty much a monopoly, now that Google seems to have officially closed the book on ever supporting postgresql. Uh, how? I wouldn't be surprised to see a Cloud SQL-like managed Postgres service from Google. While there's obviously some overlap in the potential market for any relational datastore service, Spanner doesn't really overlap with a cloud Postgres service as much as Cloud SQL does.

I would be. its been years and google and has been building out various pieces of infrastructure around mysql - including cloud spanner.

the issue is that the migration path of self hosted mysql to cloud sql to spanner is pretty well defined. I dont see postgresql being strategically important or relevant to google for anything.

if I was a startup deciding on my database, there's a lot less compelling reasons to choose postgresql from the point of view of long term viability. hell, I can pretty much do a back of the envelope calculation on how much will it cost me to support 100 million users on mysql.

Is it safe to think that Evernote and Snapchat - startups who are giant success stories - are google mysql hosted? (in some form.. maybe even spanner)

So uber, snapchat, Google, Evernote and a clear cut path for upward scale.

I have very less hope for postgresql on google cloud.

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#398

Post by sandGorgon »

manigandham wrote: post #370
sandGorgon wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RDS is not single node - its multi-AZ replicated. And that's what we are paying 300$ instead of 99$ for. Imagine.. RDS is literally the ONLY place where you can buy a 10 GB data multi-AZ replicated, snapshotted and managed postgresql. Its pretty much a monopoly, now that Google seems to have officially closed the book on ever supporting postgresql.

There are several managed hosting companies that will run Postgres (and other databases) for you on public clouds. Compose, Aiven, ElephantSQL, Database Labs, Heroku, etc. There are all kinds of price points and GCP is working on supporting postgres internally. How many nodes are you looking to run for $300/month? Unless you have more than 150gb/node of data, you don't really need a distributed database which is what…

not at the price point that RDS is at. the starting cost of a multi - az deployment is lower. For a startup thats just starting out, it is the best and safest choice. Even heroku, but im not very sure about its reliability versus rds.

Please note what im paying for is availability and reliability.. not for a database per se.

And im not even talking Aurora. That stuff is going to blow every other price point out of the water at probably higher reliability metrics.

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#399

Post by anjanb »

tyingq wrote: post #325
ChuckMcM wrote: post #89

Congratulations 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.

I thought SQL compatible means INSERT and UPDATE available. Why aren't these statements available ?

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#400

Post by sudhirj »

rrdharan wrote: post #184
sudhirj wrote: post #135

For those trying to compare this with AWS Aurora, Aurora is more a regular database (MySQL / Postgres) engine with a custom data storage plugin that's AWS/ELB/SSD/EFS-aware. Because of this the database engine can make AWS specific decisions and optimizations that greatly boost performance. It supports master-master replication in the same region, master-slave across regions. Global Spanner looks like a different bea…

> Aurora... supports master-master replication in the same region I don't believe that's true, but I could be mistaken? (Work at Google, not on Cloud Spanner)

Yeah, think you're right there. The exact text is this

> Each 10GB chunk of your database volume is replicated six ways, across three Availability Zones. Amazon Aurora storage is fault-tolerant, transparently handling the loss of up to two copies of data without affecting database write availability and up to three copies without affecting read availability. Amazon Aurora storage is also self-healing. Data blocks and disks are continuously scanned for errors and replaced automatically.

This blurs the lines a bit - the DB engine itself isn't doing the master-master replication, but the underlying storage engine is handling that. Your transactions are effectively running with synchronous replicas as if the system is master-master, but the engine itself is not. So you get the data protection guarantees from a master-master system, but not the availability.

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