AlloyDB Omni – run AlloyDB anywhere

Google Cloud gets a lot of heat because of Google&#x27;s legacy of killing things off (the exact opposite of what enterprise decision makers want when selecting a cloud platform).<p>But I have to applaud Google for the excellent first party emulators and local tooling that they provide (Alloy Omni doesn&#x27;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.<p>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.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Azure&#x2F;azure-cosmos-db-emulator-docker&#x2F;issues&#x2F;54">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Azure&#x2F;azure-cosmos-db-emulator-docker&#x2F;iss...</a>

&gt; 3. Use of the Software.<p>&gt; 3.1. Use. You may authorize employees, agents, and subcontractors to use the Software in accordance with this Section 3, so long as you remain responsible for them. You may make a reasonable number of copies of the Software for back-up and archival purposes.<p>&gt; You acknowledge that the Software is a preview offering not intended for production environments, and you agree that you will only use the Software in non-production environments.<p>Anyway, all that stuff in the docs is lovely, but if you just want to have a look:<p><pre><code> pip install gsutil gsutil cp -r gs:&#x2F;&#x2F;alloydb-omni-install&#x2F;$(gsutil cat gs:&#x2F;&#x2F;alloydb-omni-install&#x2F;latest) . </code></pre> The install scripts are only 16K, look at `installer&#x2F;scripts&#x2F;start_alloydb.sh` for more, but basically it just runs the two docker containers listed in <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cloud.google.com&#x2F;alloydb&#x2F;docs&#x2F;omni&#x2F;install#install" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cloud.google.com&#x2F;alloydb&#x2F;docs&#x2F;omni&#x2F;install#install</a><p>Seems kind of weird, having a one-time install script to prep a machine (but only a specific type of machine!) that you then run a pair of docker containers on to me, honestly. Eventually consistent deployment states? eh. whatever...

Has Google contributed some of these changes back to Postgres? I went looking and even a search for &quot;alloydb&quot; in some postgres mailing lists return no results. It has some very exciting features, I was a bit surprised to see nobody talking about it.

That’s incredible. I wasn’t expecting them to allow you to run AlloyDB on premise but this is a potential game changer for on-prem Postgres instances, especially if you are doing analytical queries on the same data set.

Redrock Postgres - Runing Cloud Native Databse Anywhere<p>Network Attached Tablespace<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;doc.rockdata.net&#x2F;admin&#x2F;network-tablespace&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;doc.rockdata.net&#x2F;admin&#x2F;network-tablespace&#x2F;</a><p>PostgreSQL Multitenant<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;doc.rockdata.net&#x2F;features&#x2F;multitenant&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;doc.rockdata.net&#x2F;features&#x2F;multitenant&#x2F;</a>

A quick demo:<p>AlloyDB Omni Columnar Engine Fast Analytics Demo - YouTube <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=f_dvdKMq6og">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=f_dvdKMq6og</a>

I see, not open source, ambiguous long term licensing, or even a commitment to a forever free.<p>I did notice the release reads just like an internal AWS PR with Andy’s preferred structure… guess all those aws folks they recruited are making an impact.

I wonder how they make transactional workloads 2x faster vs normal Postgres<p>The analytics workloads improvements seem pretty straightforward (or at least there is prior art like timescale)

&gt; AlloyDB Omni provides full compatibility with PostgreSQL extensions

Tried running it on the cloud dev environments I usually use (as I am on Windows myself).<p>Gitpod:<p><pre><code> 2023-03-29 18:13:54.044 UTC: [alloydb_util.sh:90] FATAL: Docker service must be active to run AlloyDB Omni </code></pre> GitHub Codespaces (after increasing memory):<p><pre><code> 2023-03-29 18:37:55.236 UTC: [alloydb_util.sh:76] FATAL: AlloyDB Omni requires cgroups V2 to run. </code></pre> GitHub Actions:<p><pre><code> 2023-03-29 18:53:52.766 UTC: [alloydb_util.sh:44] AlloyDB requires at least 16GB of RAM to run. Only 7 GB available. Please increase available RAM and retry </code></pre> Not today it seems. Shame, sounded super interesting.

&gt; The free developer edition of AlloyDB Omni is currently available as a technology preview. Check back for full product pricing information.<p>Thanks, but no thanks!

This looks really sharp. I wonder if Alloy gives some of the data compression benefits of columnar databases with that hybrid approach?

Hugely disappointed by Alloydb. Price and performance for a write heavy workload where off the charts horrible. It didn’t even support disabling an instance and it did only storage autoscaling much worse overall experience than using Aurora we moved back to cloudsql.<p>Does someone have good experience with Alloydb?

Maybe I&#x27;m old.. but everytime I read Alloy I think of the old modeling language out of MIT to prove a program&#x27;s correctness. Gives me PTSD thinking of grad school.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;alloytools.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;alloytools.org&#x2F;</a>

Why would anyone use this as opposed to using Postgres? The value prop of run-anywhere applies to Postgres as well. I see column store and index advisor as the two features but if I don&#x27;t need these, is there any reason?

This looks great! For the 2x general improvement, how much of that is due to setting&#x2F;modifying postgres settings and adding good indexes, versus improvements to the code itself?

Since we run Vanilla PG on on-prem, this is interesting.<p>Will try once we get clarity on licensing. (Probably we can&#x27;t use if the code is not open, so let&#x27;s see)

Is there any HA built into this? Performance claims look great.

What does it mean in terms of license?

wow