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Comment by nickpsecurity | Hacker News Reader

They're effectively competing with the likes of NonStop doing linear scaling on fault-tolerant systems but geographically distributed. The mainframe and NonStop solutions start at $1+ million if volume is significant. The VMS clusters can similarly cost 6 digits. Spanner might be cheaper than them if you need availability, consistency, and speed more than space.

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I guess I was looking at it from the wrong perspective then. It is very expensive for me then :)

I guess it is not even meant for me (a single developer with a small project) then!

I hear you on that. It's why I'm holding high hopes for CochroachDB. Otherwise, ain't no chance I can have this kind of DB. However, there is opportunity for strong consistency in a cluster in small area just distant enough to reduce cascading failures. A project might build a VMS-style, clustering system for that integrated with FOSS database. Could exist but DB subfield is too flooded for me to track.

Also take a look at https://www.pingcap.com/ for sql scale-out and http://www.scylladb.com/ for cassandra-but-fast.

Thanks for reminding me about TiDB. Turns out I was on the first thread here about it. The next had some interesting comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13298664

Particularly, the comments about them mixing Go and Rust wondering if they should move to gRPC. The integration complexity concerns me a bit but at least they're smart about what pieces they use. There was also a lot of detail in the architecture although consistency and availability vs Spanner was not clear in my links. I'll have to look into it more. Thanks.

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