Hacker News Reader

Comment by googledtest | Hacker News Reader

This is the next iteration to make Cloud Spanner more accessible for developers to start using a scalable relational database that values consistency AND availability.

If anyone wants to try out Spanner without cost, this is a great option. There's also a pretty cool starting experience in terms of in-console tutorial to set up a sample app on Spanner.

I'd love to get feedback on getting started with Spanner.

Disclaimer: as my username suggest, I work at Google, quite closely with the Cloud Spanner team.

View on HN

Can you please as your PR and PMs to change the wording here so it’s so so misleading that the offering is NOT a free tier but rather a trial?

In general Ive had pretty ridiculous trouble with GCloud reps pushing their practices and mindesets on me, across several large contracts and companies. Your team dearly needs to work on basic communication. As Sundar has said publicly, Google as a whole needs to earn back user trust. As a corporate GCloud user (not my choice), you have obliterated it time and time again, and these sorts of fake free announcements really don’t help your case.

As far as I can see, the wording on Google's pages is fine. It's just that someone else submitted it to HN under an editorialized title.

Correct, we (Google) didn't make the post, so unfortunately we don't have access to changing the title. Just have to hope folks read the comments.

No but you wrote the article, and you have a lot of people who could email hn@ycombinator.com to get the advert corrected. Again, this is more about repeatedly poor customer service than accuracy of this specific article.

To be clear, Google Cloud always had a free $300 trial. The Spanner news is confusing at best, but most likely clickbait. If you really want Spanner in your default $300 free trial, you can just ask ops to enable / increase quota for it. The OP is a promotion advert disguised as a major service change and written as a PM. That goes to the core of the untrustworthy behavior that I've observed from GCloud reps over multiple contracts.

Not sure what you mean here. The Spanner trial is a completely separate thing from the $300 starting credits. So if you use the Spanner free trial, you aren't spending any part of the $300 credits during that trial period. You can also start the free Spanner trial regardless if you've spent the $300 starting credits in the past.

The majority of relational databases scale far more than their users need. But somehow Mongo got popular enough that I am stuck with it at work.

Does the postgresql interface support jsonb?

Not currently, but it's definitely something the team has received feedback for.

Does it support Postgis or other extensions?

No extensions, no. Think of the interface more like a way for accessing Spanner features using Postgres, rather than using Postgres with a Spanner backend.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com