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Comment by CharlieDigital | Hacker News Reader

Google Cloud gets a lot of heat because of Google's legacy of killing things off (the exact opposite of what enterprise decision makers want when selecting a cloud platform).

But I have to applaud Google for the excellent first party emulators and local tooling that they provide (Alloy Omni doesn't seem like an emulator on first readthrough, but enabling fast local iteration has the same effect). The Firebase emulator suite makes development soooo fast because it cuts out a deployment step to a shared resource that has to be coordinated.

Meanwhile, Microsoft as been dragging their feet on supporting CosmosDB emulation on Arm hardware [0]. I was a big fan of CosmosDB, but kind of gave up on it after switching to an M1 MBP because it was unwieldy to work with without a local emulator.

[0] https://github.com/Azure/azure-cosmos-db-emulator-docker/iss...

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Definitely not an emulator. It's fully AlloyDB...in a container. We'll be working moving forward to smooth out the install process (tech preview, focus was on getting it in y'alls hands). In my mind, it's a proper Postgres drop-in replacement (Yes, of course I'm biased because I work at Google) but the tech is legit.

> it's a proper Postgres drop-in replacement

The only downside I see is that going through the deployment process, it seems that the smallest instance I can provision is 2vCPU/16GB which if I'm looking at the pricing table correctly, equates to $230/mo. for a single instance.

The web console only lets me create a cluster with minimum 2 instances so it seems like I'm looking at $460 minimum to deploy Alloy. That feels a bit excessive.

You're looking at Cloud AlloyDB sounds like? If you deploy AlloyDB to GCE (instead of locally, etc) you can provision a smaller instance than that. 2cpu(shared core)/4GB memory with a 20GB boot disk (AlloyDB takes up ~13) would run you $26/month before network/storage costs.

Just my $0.02 here: if Cloud AlloyDB can deploy a big cluster, it seems like such a small stretch to take the same pipeline and deploy a small instance instead.

Yah, I know. The Cloud version has a lot of stuff happening behind the scenes that makes it a bit trickier to have a smaller machine configuration. It's being worked on, but I can't speak to timelines/configurations.

I’ve gotta say without unambiguous and long term unencumbered licensing, preferably with open source attached, I can’t foresee recommending any place I’ve got influence at to even look at it yet. Hopefully you can push them in a direction that is plausibly usable by anyone other than hobbyists. Even as a local dev tool it leaves too many holes open in the licensing and distribution model. Letting a team build a process and workflow around a time bomb would be negligence. It’s sad to characterize this as such, but we’ve all been burned too many times by globo mega corp whims.

100% hear you. I realize this may sound hollow coming from a Google employee, but stay tuned on specifics around licensing and costs. Being a tech preview, there's been virtually no discussion on specifics yet. We just wanted to get the tech in folks' hands. We're pushing hard for a free tier of usage (and the product team isn't pushing back currently).

Not hollow! Good luck.

Fair but maybe drop the open source tag on the blog post, since it’s not?

At least there is a Cosmos emulator... There has been a ticket open requesting an Azure Service Bus emulator for FIVE YEARS lolsob https://github.com/Azure/azure-service-bus/issues/223

Which is too bad, because ASB is awesome, IMO the best Azure service.

Especially head scratching given that Google's Pub/Sub has an emulator as does SNS/SQS via LocalStack.

I am also a big fan of ASB and I cannot fathom how a multi-billion dollar company that bills itself on developer productivity can't ship emulators for their cloud suite.

If even for their own internal testing and release validation.

Really, then again the bar is low in Azure.

Right now it looks just like an emulator - not based on the description, but based on it being only available right now as a free developer edition "not suitable for production use". Wondering how pricing will work for the real deal, and also whether it'll be horizontally scalable like their cloud based solutions.

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