4 ms·

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,

by runeks 10y ago

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?

brangalina4eva 10y ago
Because it's highly innovative. Cost != value.
theDoug 10y ago
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.
- 010a 10y ago
  But the most successful products tend to be ones that can scale from zero to global. DynamoDB is a great example.
andrewguenther 10y ago
Why should useful things be cheap?
bradgalina4eva 10y ago
It's innovative. Cost != value.
otterley 10y ago
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.
devopsproject 10y ago
A cheap VM is not likely to give the same type of performance.
pramsey 10y ago
Concur. The pricing makes sense for their "target market" of folks who currently have a "bursting at the seams" MySQL or PgSQL instance, but it locks out folks just getting started with a tiny database and low load. This seems like bad positioning: the "bursting" folks will have to decide between the cost of re-hosting their whole system on the Cloud Spanner and trying to incrementally keep their current platform running; the small folks who would like to organically grow on a platform without scaling limits are locked out of the low end, so by the the time they are big enough to need Cloud Spanner... they too with be forced into the "re-host or muddle on" decision.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 10y ago
  > The pricing makes sense for their "target market" of folks who currently have a "bursting at the seams" MySQL or PgSQL instance My intuition, which I hope is wrong, suggests this is a small market.
- stickfigure 10y ago
  This seems like a real problem. The "bursting at the seams" people will need a pretty significant rewrite to run on Spanner, which seriously limits the appeal. The ideal market for Spanner seems to be new projects developed by big companies that know that big traffic will arrive on day 1. In other words, Google. Which I guess shouldn't be too surprising...
foolfoolz 10y ago
because if you aren't spending 8k/yr on your database then you don't need this level of scale
boulos 10y ago
To be fair, you shouldn't even run MySQL on an f1-micro. This is more on par with an 18 vcpu raw server, before you'd even consider any value that the software provides. I'd certainly love to see us get to a world where we can split up a single spanner "install" in an isolated, multitenant manner, but even for a small company, $8k/year is admittedly a small fraction of one engineer. At a company with several, you can share your single Spanner instance just like you would any other database. Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud (but not Spanner).
- _bpo 10y ago
  > even for a small company, $8k/year is admittedly a small fraction of one engineer This is certainly true, but overlooks the fact that many major products start out as experimental projects, and $8k/year is a significant investment for an experiment. If there's a reasonable upgrade path from traditional databases like MySQL and Postgres this shouldn't be a big deal, but if the answer is "rewrite your app" it will probably be a friction point for adoption.
oomkiller 10y ago
A Spanner node is not related to a VM instance, they are entirely different concepts. A Spanner node refers to a collection of regional (and eventually global) compute and storage resources, while a VM instance is just a virtual machine running on a single physical host.
dpweb 10y ago
Noticed that too, this is not for 'one guy mini-startup', but 'one guy' can already run small loads for almost free in vps. Having your database problem solved however, one less thing to worry about, if you're bigger.

by runeks 10y ago

brangalina4eva 10y ago

Because it's highly innovative. Cost != value.

theDoug 10y ago

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.

010a 10y ago
But the most successful products tend to be ones that can scale from zero to global. DynamoDB is a great example.

andrewguenther 10y ago

Why should useful things be cheap?

bradgalina4eva 10y ago

It's innovative. Cost != value.

otterley 10y ago

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.

devopsproject 10y ago

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

pramsey 10y ago

Concur. The pricing makes sense for their "target market" of folks who currently have a "bursting at the seams" MySQL or PgSQL instance, but it locks out folks just getting started with a tiny database and low load. This seems like bad positioning: the "bursting" folks will have to decide between the cost of re-hosting their whole system on the Cloud Spanner and trying to incrementally keep their current platform running; the small folks who would like to organically grow on a platform without scaling limits are locked out of the low end, so by the the time they are big enough to need Cloud Spanner... they too with be forced into the "re-host or muddle on" decision.

0xdeadbeefbabe 10y ago
> The pricing makes sense for their "target market" of folks who currently have a "bursting at the seams" MySQL or PgSQL instance My intuition, which I hope is wrong, suggests this is a small market.
stickfigure 10y ago
This seems like a real problem. The "bursting at the seams" people will need a pretty significant rewrite to run on Spanner, which seriously limits the appeal. The ideal market for Spanner seems to be new projects developed by big companies that know that big traffic will arrive on day 1. In other words, Google. Which I guess shouldn't be too surprising...

foolfoolz 10y ago

because if you aren't spending 8k/yr on your database then you don't need this level of scale

boulos 10y ago

To be fair, you shouldn't even run MySQL on an f1-micro. This is more on par with an 18 vcpu raw server, before you'd even consider any value that the software provides. I'd certainly love to see us get to a world where we can split up a single spanner "install" in an isolated, multitenant manner, but even for a small company, $8k/year is admittedly a small fraction of one engineer. At a company with several, you can share your single Spanner instance just like you would any other database. Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud (but not Spanner).

_bpo 10y ago
> even for a small company, $8k/year is admittedly a small fraction of one engineer This is certainly true, but overlooks the fact that many major products start out as experimental projects, and $8k/year is a significant investment for an experiment. If there's a reasonable upgrade path from traditional databases like MySQL and Postgres this shouldn't be a big deal, but if the answer is "rewrite your app" it will probably be a friction point for adoption.

oomkiller 10y ago

A Spanner node is not related to a VM instance, they are entirely different concepts. A Spanner node refers to a collection of regional (and eventually global) compute and storage resources, while a VM instance is just a virtual machine running on a single physical host.

dpweb 10y ago

Noticed that too, this is not for 'one guy mini-startup', but 'one guy' can already run small loads for almost free in vps. Having your database problem solved however, one less thing to worry about, if you're bigger.