The benefits of persistent memory, as I understand it, are principally improved performance (higher throughput, lower latency) and secondarily ease of programming. (Edit: another obvious benefit is cost per gigabyte; this stuff is cheaper than RAM.)

The benefits of having access to that technology on GCP (or another cloud) are the usual: reduced operational burden, increased availability, flexible pricing structure, elastic scalability, etc.

Your question about pets vs cattle is a non sequitur. Nothing about this announcement or the underlying technologies are suggestive of how they should be used (or misused). It's just a new tool in the toolbox—and as a distributed systems engineer specializing in database technology, having easy access to this hardware at scale is extremely compelling.

too bad you got downvoted, i would imagine in-memory DB and large cache.

> too bad you got downvoted

It's pretty weird to call out people for making 'pet' servers because they're daring to attach storage to them.

His native language isn't English, and people probably misunderstood his literally-translated idiom. Pet servers?

Pet's vs cattle is an analogy that originated with English-speakers.

http://cloudscaling.com/blog/cloud-computing/the-history-of-...