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.
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).
