6 ms·
Isn't Spanner outrageously expensive? ISTR reading to basically avoid touching Spanner if you're just experimenting or playing around, unless you are prepared
by jlgaddis 9y ago
Isn't Spanner outrageously expensive?
ISTR reading to basically avoid touching Spanner if you're just experimenting or playing around, unless you are prepared to receive a very large bill (something like ~$700/mo. just for the lowest-end setup).
- cobookman 9y agoIf you want to use spanner but don't have a large data workload I would recommend looking into firestore as it is built on top of spanner. http://firebase.googleblog.com/2017/10/cloud-firestore-for-rtdb-developers.html http://firebase.googleblog.com/2017/10/cloud-firestore-for-r...
- jey 9y agoIsn't it actually built on top of Datastore?
- stemuk 9y agoIt is, that is also where the name is coming from (Firebase + Datastore = Firestore). Firestore also differs a lot from Cloud Spanner, most notably in the way that it can be used directly on the client, whereas Cloud Spanner is meant to be used in combination with a server side application.
- cobookman 9y agoFirestore also has server side apis and client libraries. But yeah "same same but different".
- cobookman 9y agoLong story short. It's using spanner tech under the hood. "And for you database aficionados out there, we should point out that our multi-region database offers strong consistency (just like Cloud Spanner!),"
- jey 9y agoThat's not what the quoted text really means; Datastore has a form of strong consistency too. I'm pretty sure Firestore is built on Datastore. https://cloud.google.com/datastore/docs/concepts/structuring_for_strong_consistency https://cloud.google.com/datastore/docs/concepts/structuring...
- perfmode 9y agoI would love to be able to use some cheap, basic DB under the Spanner API for ease of migration.
- odammit 9y agoI think it’s for the convenience of people that are already using spanner and don’t want an additional data store.
- sethvargo 9y agoSpanner is relatively more expensive than something like CloudSQL or BigTable, but brings added reliability, availability, and consistency. There are definitely more cost-effective solutions for Vault storage, such as the Google Cloud Storage backend, but at the time of this writing, they do not provide the same guarantees as Spanner. Ultimately it's about your organization's risk tolerance. If a service is non-critical, non-SPOF, perhaps Spanner is overkill. On the other hand, if you have a service that requires immediate global consistency and availability, such as global secrets management, Spanner is a great choice. To be clear, this post is not saying "use Spanner with Vault"; it's saying "Spanner is now supported as a Vault storage backend for users who need the features it provides". FD: I work for Google Cloud
- toomuchtodo 9y agoCan you comment on how Spanner differs from AWS’ DynamoDB Global Tables?
- sethvargo 9y agoI'm not incredibly familiar with DynamoDB Global Tables, but a cursory browse of the marketing page, it looks like: 1. DynamoDB Global Table replication is eventually consistent to all regions; Spanner is strongly consistent in all regions 2. Spanner is a schema-based with SQL language support. DynamoDB is a noSQL store. I'm sure there are other differences that I am not aware of. DynamoDB is more closely aligned to the Google Cloud Datastore or Bittable offerings (https://cloud.google.com/free/docs/map-aws-google-cloud-platform https://cloud.google.com/free/docs/map-aws-google-cloud-plat...). You can read more about the use cases for Spanner here: https://cloud.google.com/spanner/ https://cloud.google.com/spanner/. FD: I work for Google Cloud.
- toomuchtodo 9y agoThank you! It’s relevant to a project I’m working on; appreciate the reply!
- klodolph 9y agoTo me, spanner’s main draw is automatic sharding and consistency across replicas. If you’re spending less than $700/mo on your database you probably don’t need those features. Why pay for automatic sharding if your workload fits on one machine? Why pay for global consistency if, again, you can fit everything on one machine (and therefore local consistency = global consistency)?
- puzzle 9y agoIt's not outrageously expensive if you have hit the limits of of Postgres or MySQL or need multi-region replication, but yes, for small amounts of data there's too much overhead from all the redundancy. Using it for Vault makes more sense if you are already storing other, larger amounts of data. Then the incremental cost is much smaller and more than worth it.
- hjnilsson 9y agoYes, the pricing for Spanner is fair for what it offers in production (and test). But I really think there should be a cheaper way to use it for dev purposes (and for trying it out). Either running an emulator locally, or on a micro instance equivalent in the cloud.
- qaq 9y agoA Spanner setup that will outperform PostgreSQL on a hefty x86 box will run you close to 150-200K a month.
- sam0x17 9y agoTotally. I'm hoping eventually they add a free or cheap tier of some sort for testing. Otherwise they are locking out a huge number of organizations simply because it is impractical to use something so expensive in development mode.