Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | marune's commentslogin

Is there something that explains the Pros/Cons of Spanner vs their new AlloyDB offering?

Both have a PostgreSQL compatibility layer...


I think the difference is that AlloyDB is basically PostgreSQL where they've modified how it's storing things to offer better performance via better integration with Google's infrastructure - like what Amazon did with AuroraDB. That means that AlloyDB is compatible with all the stuff you're used to using with PostgreSQL.

Spanner is a very different database. They've included a PostgreSQL query-language compatibility layer, but that isn't the same as being "100% compatible." You'll still be dealing with some Spanner concepts like not wanting to hot-spot your writes. Spanner does allow really scaling out and a truly distributed database while AlloyDB is an improvement via better integration with Google's infrastructure, but still mostly the same model.

Aurora/Alloy do have advantages by decoupling the storage from the server instances including performance and resiliency, but Spanner is really creating a horizontally scalable, distributed database - with some trade-offs.


Just from a glance at the AlloyDB documentation, it seems to be fundamentally a similar design to PostgreSQL. That is, you have a single primary instance that holds the entire dataset and handles all write traffic, plus some number of additional replicas within the system for failover and read-only queries.

Spanner has a very different implementation: your dataset is split into (possibly a large number of) shards, each of which is replicated across multiple regions. So you get better global availability and scalability, at the cost of more complicated performance characteristics when you have to do operations that involve multiple shards.


In the 3rd party section, no mention of HAProxy as a candidate, any specific reason for that?


Dell/Ubuntu, never again. Running Pop! on my Lenovo X1 Extreme 2nd gen.


The one in ME is wrong, there are roads in BSP.


It’s correct, the wilderness boundary line for Baxter follows the road. They didn’t just use the park extent.


Nope, the [park tote] road at 46.011344, -69.061875 is within the "remote radius" at peakbagger by about 450-500m. It's still in the top-50, but it's a tad lower on the list.


Consider applying for YC's Summer 2026 batch! Applications are open till May 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: