Cloud Spanner

I was reading some Google updates yesterday evening when I first encountered Google's new Cloud Spanner https://cloud.google.com/spanner/

Speaking to a few colleagues about it, we assume some of the major benefits would be

• lower latency for websites which are accessed from multiple locations
• in built "DR" and resilience
• ability to host existing apps which are built on RDBMS

Currently nodes are USD $0.90 per node per hour which works out to about USD $8,000 per year, and since you'd most likely need two or more, this solution starts at around USD $16,000 per year plus storage, plus bandwidth.