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Google Cloud Spanner is now half the cost of Amazon DynamoDB

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

#41

Post by hdjjhhvvhga »

brianolson wrote: post #11

"as little as $65 USD/month" for GCP Spanner vs AWS Free Tier: "25 GB of data storage ... 2.5 million stream read requests ..." https://aws.amazon.com/dynamodb/pricing/ So, there's probably somewhere the lines on the graph cross, but Google's headline seems misleading.

The Free Tier is completely irrelevant here, though. The very reason someone might use Spanner is its excellent scalability. I don't believe there is any reason to use it for smaller projects other than education. The customers who will use Spanners are those for whom CockroachDB is not enough, for example. For everybody with databases that are not that huge PostgreSQL will do just fine.

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

#42

Post by aketchum »

nameless912 wrote: post #38
aketchum wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

just migrated off of PG to ddb as the main db for my application (still copying data to SQL for data analytics). Working with distributed functions and code hosted on lambdas, the connection management to SQL became a nightmare with dropped requests all over the place.

A connection pooling proxy should fix this shouldn't it? I think both Google and AWS have this solved for functions as a service.

yeah but you run into other issues when you put all of your lambdas on the same VPC

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

#43

Post by tpmx »

Tehnix wrote: post #23
mmanfrin wrote: post #2

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

Curious: have they ever increased prices of existing Google Cloud services? As far as I know, AWS only ever decreases prices on services for example

GCP has seen price increases:

https://techcrunch.com/2022/03/14/inflation-is-real-google-c...

Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30671997

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

#44

Post by rlpb »

Tehnix wrote: post #23
mmanfrin wrote: post #2

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

Curious: have they ever increased prices of existing Google Cloud services? As far as I know, AWS only ever decreases prices on services for example

"Coders howl over Google's App Engine price hike (natch)" https://www.theregister.com/2011/09/02/google_app_engine_use...

I don't know if Google App Engine falls under Google Cloud services, but either way that's just a technicality; the sentiment remains the same.

Edit: more information here: https://github.com/stickfigure/blog/wiki/The-Unofficial-Goog...

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

#46

Post by heliodor »

joshe wrote: post #34

A problem for me building on this is that Google Cloud has no coherent strategy. So the price could easily be double or quadruple Amazon in 2 years. Google Maps is the key lesson here. 10 to 20 times price increase, just because someone had a meeting. No justification or coherent strategy, just "sorry here's a shiv to the gut". At least with Amazon, as chaotic as it is, you know that they just mark stuff up to the ma…

This! Google has shown many times they can't be trusted.

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

#47

Post by callalex »

xnx wrote: post #8
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...

Before they offered Google cloud, they offered Google App Engine. After they introduced Google Cloud they got bored of App Engine and 10x’d the price. This was particularly painful because App Engine was a batteries-included solution with heavy vendor lock-in.

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

#48

Post by vlovich123 »

johncessna wrote: post #21
vlovich123 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That doesn't address GCP itself getting shut down in 2 years.

I really doubt that. They’re starting to finally turn a profit ($200 million) and it’s a 8 billion in revenue a quarter line of business. Google shuts down businesses that aren’t as revenue generating but 8 billion a quarter (32B annually) is a massive business and the “losses” are likely mostly from R&D reinvestments to keep growing that line of business.

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

#49

Post by klodolph »

FredPret wrote: post #40

But a droplet with a Postgres db is nearly free, and seriously performant. And for 65/month, you can get a VERY beefy Hetzner server. You’ll have to wade through the crazy thicket that is the menu of cloud offerings. I gave that one look, and decided I might as well give up and learn the basics of Linux admin once and apply it for life.

Yeah. I think the whole point of Spanner is to handle larger, larger, larger workloads and databases, and if you can fit everything on a single server, you definitely should.

Comparing Postgres to Spanner is kind of like comparing a delivery van to a train. The train is always going to have higher overhead costs.

Linux admin is a useful skill, but I know my Linux admin skills can’t compete with the reliability, availability, and scalability of cloud systems… like Dynamo, S3, Spanner, etc.

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

#50

Post by nameless912 »

aketchum wrote: post #42
nameless912 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A connection pooling proxy should fix this shouldn't it? I think both Google and AWS have this solved for functions as a service.

yeah but you run into other issues when you put all of your lambdas on the same VPC

Not to be that guy, but why lambdas? I'm genuinely curious. I've never found the "cost savings" (big air quotes) worth it in comparison to the increased configuration/permissions complexity. Especially when Fargate exists, where you can just throw a docker container at AWS, what do Lambdas add? The zero scaling?
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