Google has announced a free trial program for AlloyDB, its fully-managed PostgreSQL-compatible database service. The trial allows users to test AlloyDB's capabilities with their own workloads for up to 30 days.
AlloyDB is designed to provide high performance, particularly in HTAP scenarios, with scalability and reliability while maintaining full compatibility with open-source PostgreSQL. Google claims AlloyDB offers up to 4x faster transactional performance than standard PostgreSQL, potentially allowing users to run workloads on smaller instances and reduce costs.
Key features of AlloyDB include:
- 99.99% availability SLA
- Minimal downtime for planned operations
- Columnar engine for analytics
- AI-assisted capabilities for management and security
- Vector search capabilities
- Integration with Google's Vertex AI and Gemini
The free trial provides users with a cluster containing an 8 vCPU, 64 GB RAM primary instance and 1 TB of regional storage. This offering is said to be more generous in terms of storage than some competitors' trial programs. Users can access their trial clusters through various methods, including AlloyDB Studio in the console, PostgreSQL clients via public IP or Auth Proxy, or private IP for applications running in the user's VPC.
Google positions AlloyDB as suitable for a range of users, including application developers, database administrators, businesses migrating from on-premises databases, startups, and data scientists working on AI applications.
While Google promotes AlloyDB as "the future of PostgreSQL," it's worth noting that other cloud providers offer similar managed PostgreSQL services. Amazon Web Services provides Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible and Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL, while Microsoft Azure offers Azure Database for PostgreSQL. User muhaym on Reddit is complimentary towards AlloyDB:
It’s insanely good for analaytical workload, specially the ones with multiple joins - but it works like magic, I don’t know how, but it gets better automatically over time. On top of it, now I’m stuck, I need to move to AWS for different reason, and there’s no compatible alternative, I don’t think Aurora is as good as alloydb is today.
Furthermore, a presentation from 2022 from Taras Kloba suggests AlloyDB outperforms AWS Aurora and Azure Cosmos DB at similar price points.
User recurrence, however, is slightly less positive:
They pitched it as a massive performance boost but I did not see that in most of my tests. The 2X better perf on average did not materialize however for large tables the vector columns did have a massive improvement. However, it didn't create vector columns for many of the places that I would have liked unfortunately.
Interested users can start their AlloyDB trial by visiting the Google Cloud console or signing up through the AlloyDB free trial link. Google has also released an e-book with more information about AlloyDB for those seeking additional details.
As with any database migration or new technology adoption, users are advised to thoroughly test their specific workloads and compare performance and costs with their current solutions and other available options in the market.
