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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

#151

Post by joshe »

idunno246 wrote: post #68
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

Yes! Saw that and was relieved I have nothing on them :-)

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

#152

Post by BoorishBears »

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.

This is going to feel like a non-answer: but if you need to ask this question in this format, save yourself some great pain and use Postgres or MongoDB, doesn't really matter which, just something known and simple.

Normally you'd make a decision like this by figuring out what your peak demand is going to look like, what your latency requirements are, how distributed are the parties, how are you handling attachments, what social graph features will you offer, what's acceptable for message dropping, what is historical retention going to look like...[continues for 10 pages]

But if you don't have anything like that, just use something simple and ergonomic, and focus on getting your first few users. There's a long gap between when the simple choice will stop scaling and those first few users.

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

#154

Post by ruuda »

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.

Postgres; the schema is still structured. But even if you want something less rigid, Postgres has a jsonb type and great operators for querying json.

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

#155

Post by naet »

I'm torn because I have really liked Google offerings in the past (I'm pretty locked in on gmail, I have different things running on GCP already, etc). But I've also been feeling burned a bit by Google suddenly ending services. I had all my domains happily in Google domains until they recently sold it suddenly to Squarespace, who I'm not interested in dealing with. My phone is a Google Pixel and I was using the Google podcast app, but just heard that too is being discontinued and moved to Youtube Music, which is a service I tried and really disliked, so now I need to find a replacement for that too. I didn't personally use some other services, but I know there have been many others ended (such as Stadia for gaming, which made a lot of press at the time).

Those are more minor services in the long run, but it makes me a little nervous to go in again on Google for a critical service. Before I invest my time and effort into using it I have to ask myself "Will Google someday sell off or end the cloud spanner service? Will I be in trouble if they do so?".

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

#156

Post by joshuamorton »

nameless912 wrote: post #147
remus wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know the spanner marketing blurb says you can scale down etc. But I think in practice spanner is primarily aimed at use cases where you'd struggle to fit everything in a single postgres instance. Having said that I guess I broadly agree with your comment. It seems like a lot of people like to plan for massive scale while they have a handful of actual users.

I said this in another comment, but I have seen _two_ applications in my career that actually had a request load that might warrant something like one of these databases. One was an application with double digit million MAU and thousands of RPS on a very shardable data set, which fit Spanner's ideal access pattern and performance profile pretty well, but we paid an absolute arm and a leg for the privilege and ended u…

Spanner isn't NoSQL. It's schema'd.

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

#157

Post by tedivm »

gregdoesit wrote: post #71

“ According to the Amazon Prime Day blog post, DynamoDB processes 126 million queries per second at peak. Spanner on the other hand processes 3 billion queries per second at peak, which is more than 20x higher, and has more than 12 exabytes of data under management.” This comparison seems to be not exactly fair? Amazon’s 126 million queries per second was purely for Amazon-related services serving Prime Day generatin…

From the AWS blog post they referenced-

> DynamoDB powers multiple high-traffic Amazon properties and systems including Alexa, the Amazon.com sites, and all Amazon fulfillment centers. Over the course of Prime Day, these sources made trillions of calls to the DynamoDB API. DynamoDB maintained high availability while delivering single-digit millisecond responses and peaking at 126 million requests per second.

Amazon was very, very clear on this. For Google to use that number without the caveat is just completely underhanded and dishonest. Whoever wrote this is absolutely lacking in integrity.

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

#158

Post by jiggawatts »

chx wrote: post #122
hdjjhhvvhga wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

AWS will happily rent you a server with 24 TB of memory for about $200/hour.

Columnar databases typically get a 10:1 compression ratio over raw data = 240 TB effectively.

That’s a lot of data.

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

#159

Post by kccqzy »

dchest wrote: post #141

"Organizations of all sizes and across all industries are increasingly looking to accelerate digital transformation and power AI-driven innovation." How did Google become like this?

The new leadership under Cloud that chases buzzwords.

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

#160

Post by endorphine »

nameless912 wrote: post #150
eklitzke wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spanner has a SQL interface, fyi.

I don't think the API you interface with fundamentally changes the point that Spanner is hard to recommend from an engineering perspective at anything except the absolute most massive of scales, and even then it will create nearly as many problems as it solves. I'm not saying spanner is _wrong_ or shouldn't exist, but it's very difficult to be in the position where Spanner is the critical key to your application's su…

Care to elaborate on what are the problems that it will create? Honest question.
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