[HN Gopher] Cloud Spanner now with a free tier ___________________________________________________________________ Cloud Spanner now with a free tier Author : config_yml Score : 62 points Date : 2022-09-15 17:44 UTC (5 hours ago) (HTM) web link (cloud.google.com) (TXT) w3m dump (cloud.google.com) | googledtest wrote: | This is the next iteration to make Cloud Spanner more accessible | for developers to start using a scalable relational database that | values consistency AND availability. | | If anyone wants to try out Spanner without cost, this is a great | option. There's also a pretty cool starting experience in terms | of in-console tutorial to set up a sample app on Spanner. | | I'd love to get feedback on getting started with Spanner. | | Disclaimer: as my username suggest, I work at Google, quite | closely with the Cloud Spanner team. | pphysch wrote: | Does the postgresql interface support jsonb? | googledtest wrote: | Not currently, but it's definitely something the team has | received feedback for. | ivanvanderbyl wrote: | Does it support Postgis or other extensions? | choppaface wrote: | Can you please as your PR and PMs to change the wording here so | it's so so misleading that the offering is NOT a free tier but | rather a trial? | | In general Ive had pretty ridiculous trouble with GCloud reps | pushing their practices and mindesets on me, across several | large contracts and companies. Your team dearly needs to work | on basic communication. As Sundar has said publicly, Google as | a whole needs to earn back user trust. As a corporate GCloud | user (not my choice), you have obliterated it time and time | again, and these sorts of fake free announcements really don't | help your case. | teraflop wrote: | As far as I can see, the wording on Google's pages is fine. | It's just that someone else submitted it to HN under an | editorialized title. | rdxm wrote: | endisneigh wrote: | Seems silly to not make it free forever for say, 1gb storage and | certain amounts of reads and writes a month. | | If cost isn't an issue my experience is that spanner is the best, | problem is there's no way to know this without paying a lot | marune wrote: | Is there something that explains the Pros/Cons of Spanner vs | their new AlloyDB offering? | | Both have a PostgreSQL compatibility layer... | teraflop wrote: | Just from a glance at the AlloyDB documentation, it seems to be | fundamentally a similar design to PostgreSQL. That is, you have | a single primary instance that holds the entire dataset and | handles all write traffic, plus some number of additional | replicas within the system for failover and read-only queries. | | Spanner has a very different implementation: your dataset is | split into (possibly a large number of) shards, each of which | is replicated across multiple regions. So you get better global | availability and scalability, at the cost of more complicated | performance characteristics when you have to do operations that | involve multiple shards. | mdasen wrote: | I think the difference is that AlloyDB is basically PostgreSQL | where they've modified how it's storing things to offer better | performance via better integration with Google's infrastructure | - like what Amazon did with AuroraDB. That means that AlloyDB | is compatible with all the stuff you're used to using with | PostgreSQL. | | Spanner is a very different database. They've included a | PostgreSQL query-language compatibility layer, but that isn't | the same as being "100% compatible." You'll still be dealing | with some Spanner concepts like not wanting to hot-spot your | writes. Spanner does allow really scaling out and a truly | distributed database while AlloyDB is an improvement via better | integration with Google's infrastructure, but still mostly the | same model. | | Aurora/Alloy do have advantages by decoupling the storage from | the server instances including performance and resiliency, but | Spanner is really creating a horizontally scalable, distributed | database - with some trade-offs. | acdha wrote: | As an aside to any Google people here, not having error handling | in your JavaScript is a bad idea - that blank page does not shout | "you should trust your most sensitive data to us" even if I know | those are separate teams. | | Echoing other people, limiting it to 90 days / 10GB is an odd | choice - if you need Spanner, you're likely to bump into both of | those limitations, especially if you're not already a GCP user. | Databases are a critical service and it takes time to evaluate | one. | qeternity wrote: | > if you need Spanner, you're likely to bump into both of those | limitations | | That's the point: if you _need_ spanner, Google wants your | money. | | This is intended as a way for people to play around with it | free of charge, in the hopes that they will realize they need | it. | jayzalowitz wrote: | Or just use cockroachdb on free teir. | bcjordan wrote: | Can we update the title to say Free trial? The minimum tier is | still $40/month (though that is a huge improvement and makes this | a reasonable option for startups). | | Was really hoping for something that could scale to zero. Better | than no change! | choppaface wrote: | Yeah this article is just pure spam. Google Cloud has always | had a max $300 free trial and the change here is now you do | Spanner woooptie wooo. The offering is not at all like AWS free | tier. | Havoc wrote: | Google has permanent free tier that is perpetual too. | | Stuff like the free VM is perpetually which to my knowledge | has not equivalent aws freebie | spankalee wrote: | This sounds different from other GCP free tiers that don't have a | time limit. The post says Spanner is free for 90 days only. | | I wish Spanner had both a fully free tier and was fully managed | like Firestore. | [deleted] | GabeWeiss_ wrote: | Yah, the title's not 100% right. :) There isn't a free TIER of | Spanner. This is a 90 day free trial. | bearjaws wrote: | No software company goes from 0 to Cloud Spanner in 90 days... | Any new company will continue to use Postgres. | | If GCP was smart they would make it free for life, then one in | every 3000 customers would blow up and they could charge Oracle | prices. | booi wrote: | > one in every 3000 customers would blow up and they could | charge Oracle prices. | | don't give them any ideas.. | tmpz22 wrote: | I think Spanner has always been targeted largely at mid- | enterprise and bigger companies. Its potentially a VERY sticky | product that may be tremendously difficult to offboard from. | Small concessions like this 90 day trial doesn't really change | that. | | Especially with my understanding that a lot of GCP leadership | is ex-Oracle, the whole vibe of Spanner seems to be a run at | Oracle's marketshare. | Jyaif wrote: | So that hackers don't waste time looking at Spanner: The price | starts at north of 300$ per month | (https://cloud.google.com/spanner/pricing) | | [edit] I'm apparently wrong. | | This is still a masterclass in how not to do a pricing page IMO. | teraflop wrote: | If I'm reading that page right, the actual minimum cost (in us- | west1) is $65.70/month, because a "node" is $657/month, but if | you look elsewhere in the documentation, it says a single | "instance" can be as small as 1/10 of a node. | | I have no idea why they chose to structure the pricing model | this way, but it makes the entry-level cost look a lot worse | than it really is. | pxx wrote: | It's a historical artifact of how you used to buy it. | https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/databases/use- | spanner... | googledtest wrote: | It might also be worth pointing out that 'node' does not | reference underlying server. | | In a PG or similar architecture, node might be used to | specify how many "nodes" are in a replicated setup for high | availability purposes. | | In Spanner, "Node" is a measure of compute capacity (as is | the finer-grain processing units) allowing you to scale | up/down without impacting an application's workload. | | All instances get high availability regardless of number of | nodes or processing units, and the specifics of this are | handled by the configuration. | GabeWeiss_ wrote: | This isn't true at all. Where are you getting your numbers | from? | googledtest wrote: | That may have been true at one point, but now you can use | Spanner closer to $60-70 a month factoring in storage (and even | cheaper with committed use discounts) after upgrading from the | free trial instance. | https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/databases/use-spanner... | clhodapp wrote: | It appears to be a (90 day) free trial rather than a (long-term) | free tier. | GabeWeiss_ wrote: | Yup, correct. The title here isn't right. It's a free trial, | not a free tier. | asim wrote: | Technology behind spanner is incredible but unfortunately | marketed horribly and positioned terribly. It was a solution | built for large scale enterprise and no one else. It's not worth | trying to sell this to developers. They're better off layering | something else on top with a different brand and pricing model. | danielmarkbruce wrote: | Bad marketing, bad pricing, bad positioning. It's crazy. | Amazing technology. | bushbaba wrote: | its a solution built for google where they need to track ad | budget burn down globally. Most enterprises dont have this | problem, or the latency/performance/uptime requirements of | google. | | Then you've got a google proprietary API for what should be | similar to Aurora with PostgreSQL wire compatibility. | | Add in Google's history of deprecating and non-backwards | compatible changes to SDKs. | | That makes you wonder, who exactly Spanner IS geared towards. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-09-15 23:00 UTC)