The only complaint so far is that there are very few supported regions. (Oregon, N. Virginia, Frankfurt, Ireland, Singapore, Mumbai for AWS, and São Paulo, California, South Carolina, Iowa, St. Ghislain, Jurong West for GCP, as of now.) Even the list of supported regions could not be found online, only to be found after signing up. Was it intentional to drop the information from the documentation? Not that this is a huge problem, considering I'm still on the free plan, but I wonder if they're planning to add more regions in the near future.
I'm currently using Fauna which offers the same strongly consistent global reads with higher latency writes approach, and their pricing is much better for smaller-budget projects that can benefit from global replication.
[1] https://www.infoq.com/news/2021/10/cockroachdb-serverless/
This simple scheme allows all members including replicas to serve read-after-write consistency and penalizes the write op that happened. That write op wont be acknowledged to the caller until it has been applied everywhere.
There are no fault tolerance issues here btw. If any replica fails, as long as quorum was reached, the repair procedure will ensure that write will be eventually applied to all replicas. If the quorum itself could not been reached then the write is lost anyways and is no different than the typical case of reading just from the leader.
However, for the sake of discussion, this is an interesting point on the design spectrum! A scheme that provides read-your-writes but not monotonic reads is essentially what you would get if you took global tables as described in this blog post, but then never had read-only transactions commit-wait. It's a trade-off we considered early in the design of this work and one that we may consider exposing in the future for select use cases. Here's the relevant section of the original design proposal, if you're interested: https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/blob/master/docs/RF....
That removes all the fault tolerance. What do you do if you never get the acknowledgement from all replicas?
E.g. If I have a multi-tenant architecture but want a global table for say a postgres full-text-search index of content from the distributed tenants, what would the recommend route be?
Global tables seem like a great feature. I'd gladly sacrifice write speed for it.
