4 ms·

Spanner is ridiculously expensive. Though I get your point, it’s not like an iPhone. An iPhone is not actually that expensive compared to top end android phones

Spanner is ridiculously expensive. Though I get your point, it’s not like an iPhone. An iPhone is not actually that expensive compared to top end android phones. Spanner is very expensive even compared to hosted cockroach and RDS (Aurora). That being said I’m sure if you're enterprise it's substantially cheaper. Spanner generally is about twice the cost as cockroach which seems cheap but the gap in nominal cost only grows with usage. The other issue is that since there’s no source to self host you also have to pay, unlike cockroach. Generally with cockroach I’d expect one to self host all instances except a staging/pre-pod and prod. With Spanner all your instances necessarily will be hosted, which means $$. That being all said, Spanner is worth it if money isn’t an issue

roncesvalles 3y ago
The thing is, there is nothing else like Spanner, unless you want to trust a startup with your database, which opens up Cockroach, Yuga, and TiDB. Databases like RDS don't compare because they don't offer the same guarantees. Nothing even in AWS' and Azure's portfolios is like Spanner. Back of napkin math I did a couple of months ago: Spanner costs about $1/month for 2 writes/second and 10 reads/second. The minimum is $88 which is 176wps and 880rps. If your startup gets more traffic than that, you have good problems. The simplified guarantee model (fully linearizable and serializable everything; automagic sharding, replication and failover) could save you costs elsewhere. Low-value high-volume data like logs and search queries can be sent to a cheaper self-hosted timeseries/fts database.
- ddorian43 3y ago
  You forgot storage costs and especially bandwidth costs and lockin costs and probably range-queries costs.