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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

#61

Post by Vt71fcAqt7 »

hdjjhhvvhga wrote: post #41
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.

Very true, but most people do not yet no about scale-to-zero pay-for-what-you-use sql server clouds with a free tier like CockroachDB and neon. They think that you must pay $5 a month to run a sql server, which has been the case until very recently, so they go with no sql options to get the free tier.

Edit: actualy Spanner looks like another CockroachDB. You use sql to interact with it. In which case I can see many people who would want to use this with a free tier for hobby projects. ie. in between education and production development.

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

#62

Post by mattzito »

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.

GCP is profitable and growing 27% YoY. It made more money than YouTube ads did in Q2 2023. In what world would it make sense to shut down GCP at this point?

I think the "google shuts things down" trope is justified and something that I wince at every time I see something like this, but GCP isn't a random pet project that loses money and has no users. It's a very successful enterprise business.

(disclaimer: I work at google in cloud, so obviously I have personal bias, but this is just my opinion based on the pure numbers.)

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

#63

Post by avereveard »

ajross wrote: post #52
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.

it's a bit different because the free tier for dynamodb is not like the other 12 month limited offer, it's marketed as free forever, so it's not just an intro product, it's something you can run a small business off for free.

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

#64

Post by vlovich123 »

emodendroket wrote: post #55
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.

I mean, a common joke among ICs at Google is that the API or service you're calling is deprecated but the replacement system isn't ready yet. They have good tools, but the cavalierness about breaking changes would be more because teams can just say "not supported" anymore for internal APIs and services, a more thorough test suite, & really principled rollout strategies to catch issues before they get too big.

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

#65

Post by sandrob57 »

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…

Oof, thanks for reminding me about the Google Maps pricing increase.

It was very difficult to understand their thought process, and we were pretty much forced to find alternative services that had a more reasonable pricing structure. The amount they wanted to charge us for a few million geocode requests per month was bananas.

Was there really no value in keeping a customer like us around at a more reasonable rate?

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

#66

Post by tpmx »

jefftk wrote: post #29
Tehnix wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

AWS has increased prices, most recently when they started charging for static IPs (even ones attached to a running instance).

That one caused a week of work for me... (redesigning something slated to go live in a few months)

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

#67

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#68

Post by idunno246 »

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…

The gcs change last year was also terrible, such an expensive increase

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

#70

Post by sakopov »

nameless912 wrote: post #50
aketchum wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Your mileage may vary, but I think in majority of the cases Fargate is going to be significantly more expensive than Lambda.
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