> "Between Google App Engine and Cloud Datastore, we’ve never had to have an explicit infrastructure on-call rotation."
So many people gloss over this fact. Hiring top notch DevOps is extremely hard and expensive for a startup (the best ones all have jobs and likely work for Google). Nobody likes being on rotation (or carrying a pager).
If you can base your initial platform on something like GAE, this decision alone will more than pay for itself over the long run.
To be fair , it's well know that GCloud is way more friendlier for small teams than AWS.
That said it lack some services that are widely popular on AWS ( SNS , Cognito , SES...).
I think many people over-estimate by a huge factor, how tough it is to run and maintain things. The cloud providers of course, love this!
We have a small, experienced team with a lot of operational experience, so we know how we could build this with other technologies and how to maintain it (And how much time it would take). All of that would be time away from actually building the product, and it would also change some of the character of what is expected for the job.
We have worked at some of the larger bay area companies, and there are some really nice aspects of those jobs. One of them is having a strong enough operational base so that you can concentrate on planning and building a thing, instead of always being caught in a reactionary loop.
Postgres is always going to have a special place in my heart, and we do use it as well, we are just careful to use it in operational ways that won't ruin our weekends. If this feature were the one core thing that made Streak special, we likely would have built it with Postgres and Citus, but it is just one of many features, and going with Spanner let's us treat it that way.