5 ms·

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 document

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 4y ago
It's a historical artifact of how you used to buy it. https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/databases/use-spanner-at-low-cost-with-granular-instance-sizing https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/databases/use-spanner...
googledtest 4y ago
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.