The Free Tier is completely irrelevant here, though. The very reason someone might use Spanner is its excellent scalability. I don't believe there is any reason to use it for smaller projects other than education. The customers who will use Spanners are those for whom CockroachDB is not enough, for example. For everybody with databases that are not that huge PostgreSQL will do just fine.
> If you squint, any database engine is “in memory” if there is more buffer than data.
That is sadly not true, I remember one lonely night debugging a MSSQL 2012 instance that was _very_ slow, and it turned out that for a simple query (one join, 100 rows in one table and 10 in the other, 100 result in total, one where clause) it forced writing the result to disk before evaluating the WHERE condition. Unable to fight the scheduler I've ended up making a ramdisk for this data.
Very true, but most people do not yet no about scale-to-zero pay-for-what-you-use sql server clouds with a free tier like CockroachDB and neon. They think that you must pay $5 a month to run a sql server, which has been the case until very recently, so they go with no sql options to get the free tier.
Edit: actualy Spanner looks like another CockroachDB. You use sql to interact with it. In which case I can see many people who would want to use this with a free tier for hobby projects. ie. in between education and production development.
> Edit: actualy Spanner looks like another CockroachDB. You use sql to interact with it. In which case I can see many people who would want to use this with a free tier for hobby projects. ie. in between education and production development.
Pedantically, cockroachDB is another spanner. It was made by Google devs who left Google having previously used spanner, and intentionally made something similar to spanner (ish, lots of handwaving happening here)
oh cmon. this is just 50 QPS. i mean yea obviously for someone having as little as 50QPS is not going to bother with the massive scale and availability in cloud spanner.
there are a TON of applications today reaching 100M+ users in just a month. you are not dealing with 50QPS. oh and you forgot the crazy byte boundaries in DynamoDB.
if you go over a single byte above 1kb, you are charged 2 Read units !
That seems nitpicky. The free tier is a marketing program, not a product.
"Google should offer intro discounts" is IMHO a very valid point (absolutely no idea why this doesn't exist), but it doesn't really speak to whether or not the real product is more or less expensive.
it's a bit different because the free tier for dynamodb is not like the other 12 month limited offer, it's marketed as free forever, so it's not just an intro product, it's something you can run a small business off for free.
author is a flakey writer. Writes an article about "TESCREAL"[1] but doesn't define it but links to another of their articles where it's defined buried in the middle of the 4th paragraph. Author notes they come from this crackpot culture, and they're really still in it and they do a weak job of organizing their thoughts for any audience not in their head.
[1] "transhumanism, Extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism and longtermism" being major themes and key words in the crackpot intelligentsia scene the article is about.
The homepage is all hype, I'm still not sure what Astro really _is_. From clicking through to GitHub I know you install it with npm, so I guess it's written in JavaScript. I guess it's focused on browser side but for 'all in one's I'd expect something server side too?
It's a static site generator (that can also run SSR sites if you need to update pages fast - e.g. for ecommerce) for conent focused sites + a custom templating language that lets you use UI components from any framework.
It's a framework like NextJS. It focuses on static content generation first but allows you to make small parts of the page interactive (JS rendered) instead of making whole pages JS rendered in order to facilitate some interactive widget in the corner (hence the name Islands Architecture).
It also has an ability to mix and match components from different frameworks on the same page/site. I think this is mostly a gimmick though, no one should be pulling in multiple frameworks for a single page or site.
Definitely not a gimmick; it's not that most teams would pull in components from different frameworks, it's that teams can add targeted interactivity using the framework of their choice on one shared templating framework that can run on the server per request or generated once on build.
Astro is really, really neat, IMO and suitable for use cases that are content focused but still require encapsulated areas of interactive components.
we could infer it doesn't run anything client side nor server side, so it looks like a neighbour comment would be right, this homepage is all about a fancy way of describing a static site generator?
I've been using math and C++ to do redistricting since about 2005 ( https://bdistricting.com/ ). It definitely occurred to me along the way that for the mere cost of a year or two of software engineer time, I could totally build an _evil_ version of my impartial redistricting software that optimized for evil goals. But I obviously didn't want evil ends, and sadly no one even offered to pay me to be evil ;-)
For many years California had a bipartisan gerrymander that made the 60:40 D:R state have about 60/40 in its state legislature and US House districts and every seat was a safe seat. That's a certain kind of democracy death. :-/
I'd much rather have any algorithm that gives no power to any parties, and solves a better answer to the question "what is a district for?" (my short short: Local representation for local issues)
As other comments have also noted, lots of people don't want _geographic_ representation but some kind of other issue/identity Proportional Representation. Yup. Also true. My dream State Legislature has a PR Senate at-large across the whole state in batches of 20 or so, and a small-local-district House.
Principal/Architect Software Engineer with 22+ years of experience. Focuses in high performance, high reliability, distributed networks. Comfortable negotiating with stakeholders to design the right solution. Technical leadership of small groups and mentoring junior engineers while also directly contributing to the Software Engineering effort. Design new high performance software from scratch or analyze an existing system and improve its performance.
I want to make things I'm proud of that matter to people and make the world a better place; and I want to solve interesting technical challenges along the way.
Tool for running online rankings/ratings polls. Use for low stakes stuff like deciding what movie to watch, group outing destination, club elections, etc. Can require google/fb login to de-dup votes, or can allow anonymous votes.
vs AWS Free Tier:
"25 GB of data storage ... 2.5 million stream read requests ..."
https://aws.amazon.com/dynamodb/pricing/
So, there's probably somewhere the lines on the graph cross, but Google's headline seems misleading.