Right. That's the choice cash-strapped startups will make instead of using this. And once they're experts at that particular problem domain, they will figure ou

Right. That's the choice cash-strapped startups will make instead of using this. And once they're experts at that particular problem domain, they will figure out how to make their first choice redundant/HA enough that they probably won't need what spanner provides. I used Linux instead of Windows NT as a kid because it was cheaper and ran well on cheaper hardware. Then I became an expert at it. Then it became the OS I used for servers. I've wanted to use spanner for years, but at this point, the longest my production SQL database will ever be down is for less than 2-3 minutes, and it's not worth more than the cost of a rack full of servers and a massive migration effort to theoretically shave off a couple minutes of potential downtime for me. If I'm going to go that route, I would probably just opt for something like DRBD. The way my current infrastructure is set up, it wouldn't add any costs for me to do this.