Google Cloud Spanner is now half the cost of Amazon DynamoDB

#1

Post by forrestbrazeal » Wed, Oct 11, 2023, 5:25 PM UTC

Google Cloud Spanner is now half the cost of Amazon DynamoDB
cloud.google.com

Re: Google Cloud Spanner is now half the cost of Amazon DynamoDB

#2

Post by mmanfrin » Wed, Oct 11, 2023, 6:07 PM UTC

Google also has a history of massively spiking the cost of its services. Vendor lockin is a dangerous thing.

Re: Google Cloud Spanner is now half the cost of Amazon DynamoDB

#3

Post by andrewedstrom » Wed, Oct 11, 2023, 6:08 PM UTC

Not pictured: the cost of switching to DynamoDB when this service inevitably gets shut down in two years.

Re: Google Cloud Spanner is now half the cost of Amazon DynamoDB

#4

Post by grogenaut » Wed, Oct 11, 2023, 6:09 PM UTC

if they're cutting the price they are likely worried about the product... are they going to cancel it like every other product they've released?

Re: Google Cloud Spanner is now half the cost of Amazon DynamoDB

#5

Post by spullara » Wed, Oct 11, 2023, 6:09 PM UTC

Without an on-demand version of spanner that doesn't charge per node but per operation makes it not comparable to dynamodb for many use cases.

Re: Google Cloud Spanner is now half the cost of Amazon DynamoDB

#6

Post by vlovich123 » Wed, Oct 11, 2023, 6:11 PM UTC

andrewedstrom wrote: post #3

Not pictured: the cost of switching to DynamoDB when this service inevitably gets shut down in two years.

There’s no way spanner gets shut down. It’s critical to so much of Google’s internal infra.

Re: Google Cloud Spanner is now half the cost of Amazon DynamoDB

#7

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Oct 11, 2023, 6:12 PM UTC

andrewedstrom wrote: post #3

Not pictured: the cost of switching to DynamoDB when this service inevitably gets shut down in two years.

[deleted]

Re: Google Cloud Spanner is now half the cost of Amazon DynamoDB

#8

Post by xnx » Wed, Oct 11, 2023, 6:14 PM UTC

mmanfrin wrote: post #2

Google also has a history of massively spiking the cost of its services. Vendor lockin is a dangerous thing.

This definitely happened with Google Maps, where Google was clearly the dominant player. Has it happened to other services? It seems far less likely to happen for business cloud services where they are a distance 2nd (3rd?) to AWS. I know of some examples (admittedly ancient) where they have reduced costs: https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2015/05/Pay-Less-Comput...

Re: Google Cloud Spanner is now half the cost of Amazon DynamoDB

#9

Post by klodolph » Wed, Oct 11, 2023, 6:14 PM UTC

andrewedstrom wrote: post #3

Not pictured: the cost of switching to DynamoDB when this service inevitably gets shut down in two years.

I get the skepticism, but these core SaaS offerings tend to have a much longer support life than consumer products. Google’s Bigtable is still around as a cloud offering, and it’s almost 20 years old at this point.

Spanner is used for a lot of internal Google services, too. Spanner has basically been eating all the other databases Google uses internally. Nom nom nom, every database that used to be something else is now Spanner.

Re: Google Cloud Spanner is now half the cost of Amazon DynamoDB

#10

Post by benmanns » Wed, Oct 11, 2023, 6:14 PM UTC

I wish I could play around with Spanner for personal/side projects, but a production ready instance starts at $65/mo. DynamoDB can run for ~$0.00/month with per-request pricing.