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.
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.