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Comment by jchrisa | Hacker News Reader

As a bit of a veteran in the database industry, I concur (at least about the impact on Oracle's database business). There is a lot of pent-up demand for anything that offers distributed consistency.

We've been seeing this demand at Fauna. FaunaDB offers distributed consistency, based on Raft and the Calvin protocol instead of depending on specific networking and clock hardware. We've seen a big part of our appeal is the ability to run FaunaDB across multiple cloud services.

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Wait, Fauna uses the Calvin protocol? Would you mind linking a white paper? I didn't realize it was in use outside Calvin/CalvinFS.

We have kept it under wraps. The whitepaper will be ready next month most likely.

Awesome! I'll keep an eye out.

What is the monetisation plan? Purely SAAS with on-premise or an open source version with support like postgres/mysql?

The serverless cloud is pay-as-you-go. There is no minimum spend, unlike Spanner's $1000 per month (apparently). And it's cheaper than operating any open source on cloud hardware.

On-premises is licensed by core.

We have a developer edition you can use on your local machine, but we don't currently have plans to open source FaunaDB itself.

Where did you read that Cloud Spanner has a $1,000 per month minimum spend? I can't seem to find any mention of this.

Minimum 3 nodes * node pricing of $.90/hour = 30.924*30 = 1944/month.

Where is this 3-node minimum mentioned? URL please?

Edit: Looks like maybe you're referring to the recommended 3 node minimum in production mentioned at https://cloud.google.com/spanner/docs/instance-configuration

While I'm not familiar with Spanner's inner workings, I would guess that they recommend 3 instances for quorum establishment in case a region becomes unreachable. If that's the case, using fewer than 3 instances could cause major problems.

Since Spanner currently only supports single-region deployments, it clearly isn't recommended as protection against a region becoming unavailable.

It may be recommended as protection against an availability issue on an instance, though, which is, after all, a big reason why you'd want a distributed DB in production.

Even within a single region you can put three nodes in different zones.

I suppose the loss of a region doesn't apply (yet), but yes, the quorum requirement would still apply even if you only had instances in a single region.

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