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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

#51

Post by xnx »

callalex wrote: post #47
xnx wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Good history lesson. I didn't realize that Google Cloud wasn't a rename/expansion of Google App Engine.

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

#52

Post by ajross »

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.

That seems nitpicky. The free tier is a marketing program, not a product.

"Google should offer intro discounts" is IMHO a very valid point (absolutely no idea why this doesn't exist), but it doesn't really speak to whether or not the real product is more or less expensive.

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

#54

Post by callalex »

klodolph wrote: post #9
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 n…

Remember AppEngine?

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

#55

Post by emodendroket »

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…

Yegge had an article saying that Google had really good tools to clean up uses of deprecated calls and the like and this had made them way too cavalier about breaking changes. Can't vouch for it but an interesting dynamic.

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

#56

Post by nameless912 »

teaearlgraycold wrote: post #20
nameless912 wrote: post #15

And for many projects, Postgres is still cheaper than both. Having used both, I would much, much rather do the work to fit my project in Postgres/CockroachDB than use either Spanner or DynamoDB, which have WAY more footguns. Not to mention sudden cost spikes, vendor lock in, and god knows what else. AWS and GCP (and Azure, and Oracle cloud, and bare Kubernetes via an operator, and...) support Postgres really well. Ju…

Postgres is the database God himself would have made.

Like, I don't want to fanboy, but it's _hard_ to find a use case that postgres can't handle at small to medium (i.e. 90% of projects) scale.

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

#57

Post by debatem1 »

goeldhru wrote: post #36

If only someone could actually run and publish comparison benchmarks, but DeWitt clause by Spanner makes it impossible.

Can you go into more detail on this? I assumed almost everyone using systems like this that tout scalability was doing benchmarks.

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

#58

Post by hatsix »

paxys wrote: post #22
nameless912 wrote: post #15

And for many projects, Postgres is still cheaper than both. Having used both, I would much, much rather do the work to fit my project in Postgres/CockroachDB than use either Spanner or DynamoDB, which have WAY more footguns. Not to mention sudden cost spikes, vendor lock in, and god knows what else. AWS and GCP (and Azure, and Oracle cloud, and bare Kubernetes via an operator, and...) support Postgres really well. Ju…

Postgres is a piece of software. Cloud Spanner/Dynamo etc are managed services. It makes no sense to directly compare one with the other.

Sure, You can compare Cloud SQL vs Cloud Spanner and RDS vs Dynamo, but it makes more sense to just say "Postgres" and assume that the reader can figure out that it means "Whatever managed postgres service you want to use".

The entire point is that every cloud provider has a managed postgres offering, and there's no vendor lock-in. Though, technically, Dynamo does have a docker image you could run in other cloud providers if it came down to that, you'd get no support for it.

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

#59

Post by emodendroket »

nameless912 wrote: post #15

And for many projects, Postgres is still cheaper than both. Having used both, I would much, much rather do the work to fit my project in Postgres/CockroachDB than use either Spanner or DynamoDB, which have WAY more footguns. Not to mention sudden cost spikes, vendor lock in, and god knows what else. AWS and GCP (and Azure, and Oracle cloud, and bare Kubernetes via an operator, and...) support Postgres really well. Ju…

I mean sure, NoSQL gives you more opportunities to screw stuff up because it's doing less for you. But it can be a reasonable tradeoff in some scenarios anyway

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

#60

Post by brycelarkin »

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…

Not true anymore after AWS’s ipv4 pricing announcement.
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