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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

#121

Post by idunno246 »

TheTaO wrote: post #14

That headline is half truth. Price of a cloud database depends on so many things. what is the I/O, what is the storage utilization, cross-region traffic, etc. Picking one scenario and claiming the cost to be half is too simplistic and a marketing gimmick.

Also which dynamo price are they comparing to? On demand? Provisioned? Reserved provisioned? We had a huge spanner db with low throughput so had to add idle nodes just for storage which also ballooned costs for spanner(the increased storage size here helps)

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

#122

Post by chx »

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.

> For everybody with databases that are not that huge PostgreSQL will do just fine.

Ha. Remember Gary Bernhardt of WAT fame? https://twitter.com/garybernhardt/status/600783770925420546

> Consulting service: you bring your big data problems to me, I say "your data set fits in RAM", you pay me $10,000 for saving you $500,000.

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

#123

Post by keltex »

vlovich123 wrote: post #64
emodendroket wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Perfect example of this is google analytics. The depreciated Universal Analytics on 7/1/2023:

https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/11583528?hl=en

But the API to access the replacement GA4 data is still in Beta: (for dotnet / go / python and node):

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

#124

Post by meowtimemania »

benmanns wrote: post #10

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.

This is the main reason I like DynamoDB. I can run side projects indefinitely for basically $0/month.

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

#125

Post by silisili »

airstrike wrote: post #107
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…

Except for projects for which NoSQL is a better fit than a RDBMS, no? If I'm writing a chat app with millions of messages and very little in the way of "relationships", should I use Postgres or some flavor of NoSQL? Honest question.

I've found it's pretty easy to massage data either way, depending on your preference. The one I'm working on now ultimately went from postgres, to mysql, to dynamo, the latter mainly for cost reasons.

You do have to think about how to model the data in each system, but there are very few cases IMO where one is strictly 'better.'

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

#126

Post by meowtimemania »

bananapub wrote: post #111
brianolson wrote: post #16

but as always: Are you sure your data doesn't fit in PostgreSQL? You should probably try PostgreSQL first.

that really should be the first heuristic for almost any systems design problem - if you can afford to buy a big enough pair of machines to fit your data in hot-swap postgres then just do that. don't bother with mongo or mysql or dynamo or cassandra or bigtable or spanner or ... until your lack of profitability or size means you can't afford to just use postgres.

What do you mean "can't afford to just use postgres"? I thought postgres cost per query in many cases is cheaper than competitors.

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

#127

Post by bananapub »

meowtimemania wrote: post #126
bananapub wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that really should be the first heuristic for almost any systems design problem - if you can afford to buy a big enough pair of machines to fit your data in hot-swap postgres then just do that. don't bother with mongo or mysql or dynamo or cassandra or bigtable or spanner or ... until your lack of profitability or size means you can't afford to just use postgres.

What do you mean "can't afford to just use postgres"? I thought postgres cost per query in many cases is cheaper than competitors.

> What do you mean "can't afford to just use postgres"?

if I have 10TB of hot data, can I afford two machines with 10T of RAM each? how about 100T?

> I thought postgres cost per query in many cases is cheaper than competitors.

that's not really a useful metric without size/latency/etc attached to it, being cheap for 0.1qps might be fine for a YC company but that's no good for my successful company etc

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

#128

Post by meowtimemania »

theshrike79 wrote: post #118
guluarte wrote: post #28

99% of the projects dont need dynamodb/spanner/ScyllaDB

DynamoDB has a free tier. I've been running a semi-active app wholly on the free tier for a good 3-4 years now. Lambda is free too. I think the only thing I pay for is API Gateway, and that's around $2 a month max.

Have you considered doing CloudFront --> Lambda Function URL? Would that lower your costs?

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

#129

Post by easton »

gregdoesit wrote: post #82
forrestbrazeal wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We shared some details about Gmail's migration to Spanner in this year's developer keynote at Google Cloud Next [0] - to my knowledge, the first time that story has been publicly talked about. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=268jdNwH6AM

I tried to find it in this video, but failed. Could you please share a time stamp on where to look? It’s a pretty big deal if Gmail migrated to GCP-provided Spanner(not to an internal Spanner instance) and sounds like he kind of vote of confidence GCP and Cloud Spanner could benefit from: might I suggest to write about it? It’s easier to digest and harder to miss than an hour-long keynote video with no time stamps. A…

It looks like the Spanner beta dropped to the public in 2017, so https://cloud.google.com/spanner/docs/release-notes#February...

I don't think they would've migrated again to GCP Spanner (even if it would've been a show of faith).

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