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Spanner is just great, yet expansive. Do you know how many nodes Walmart uses?

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I haven't found any specific information about instance configuration and region deployment for Walmart. But you are absolutely correct, Spanner is quite expensive.

I assume Walmart has a custom-tailored contract with much better rates that are visible in the GC calculator (https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator). Plus, they definitely use multi-year reserved instances. On a three-year contract, it's 40% lower price.

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Ah yeah I bet they have a special contract. There is this article about Pokemon Go [0] using Spanner, which states that they have 5000 nodes any given time.

The pricing calculator will not even calculate this, as it is limited to 4k nodes which costs $12,724,800.00/ mo with the 3 year usage discount.

[0] https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/developers-practitioners/how-pok%C3%A9mon-go-scales-millions-requests?hl=en

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(Expensive)

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I enjoyed reading this. The accuracy is amazing, thanks to the TrueTime API.

Thanks for the shoutout, Samuel!

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