Comment by barosl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by barosl | Hacker News Reader

I recently tried CockroachDB's serverless offering and I was very satisfied with it. It has a generous free tier, easy-to-understand pricing, and a query analyzer that helps me estimate how much a query would cost. It is still in beta but already feels extremely polished.

The only complaint so far is that there are very few supported regions. (Oregon, N. Virginia, Frankfurt, Ireland, Singapore, Mumbai for AWS, and São Paulo, California, South Carolina, Iowa, St. Ghislain, Jurong West for GCP, as of now.) Even the list of supported regions could not be found online, only to be found after signing up. Was it intentional to drop the information from the documentation? Not that this is a huge problem, considering I'm still on the free plan, but I wonder if they're planning to add more regions in the near future.

Does their serverless offering actually support Global Tables? Last time I checked I remember only being able to select a single region. Their dedicated offering supported multiple regions, but started at several hundred dollars per month, which is pretty prohibitive for someone just starting out.

I'm currently using Fauna which offers the same strongly consistent global reads with higher latency writes approach, and their pricing is much better for smaller-budget projects that can benefit from global replication.

They said they were planning to expand its coverage to the multi-region use case last year[1], but nothing's concrete. I've heard good things about Fauna, but having to rely on their own query language put me off. I might have to revisit it in the future, though.

[1] https://www.infoq.com/news/2021/10/cockroachdb-serverless/

Thanks, that's good to know! Happy to see more competition in this space.

Really love being able to reason about a globally replicated DB as if it was in a single location with strongly consistent reads. The mental model is so much simpler than a single-primary read replica setup.

The cost in write latency is worth it IMO since it's still usually fast enough for most use cases, and nudges me towards using alternative replication strategies for use cases that are sensitive to write latency (instead of deluding myself into believing my app is fast for everybody when it's only fast for me because I chose a primary that's physically close to where I live).

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