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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

#161

Post by cdelsolar »

sakopov wrote: post #70
nameless912 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think that's actually true on a GB-second basis (memory * CPU)?

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

#163

Post by btown »

naet wrote: post #155

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 Googl…

As someone in the midst of transitioning an organization to GKE, Google Domains was the first shutdown that truly frightened me - AFAIK the first true B2B IT offering that was unceremoniously shuttered. Domain registration may be a regulatory/reputational minefield - but then so are many of their other cloud offerings, up to and including content distribution. I don't think it's indicative of a larger pattern of shutting down Google Cloud services yet, but it's certainly a yellow flag at least.

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

#164

Post by kccqzy »

gregdoesit wrote: post #89
dmoy wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I will say that it does show a vote of confidence to say that Photos, Gmail and Ads use GCP infra, I'm not sure? I guess I'm mostly not sure what "gcp infra" means there. The blog post says "Spanner is used ubiquitously inside of Google, supporting services such as; Ads, Gmail and Photos." But there's google-internal spanner, and gcp spanner. A service using spanner at Google isn't necessarily using gcp. (No clue a…

Surely in a post about Google Cloud Spanner, all examples mentioned use Google Cloud Spanner? It would be moot listing them as examples if they would not: so my assumption is they are all using GCP infra already for Spanner. I really want to give Google the benefit of the doubt: but it doesn't help that they did not write that eg Gmail is using "Cloud Spanner." They wrote that it uses Spanner.

Years ago they did a reorg and moved all infrastructure services under Cloud even though they are not Cloud products. That would enable this kind of obfuscation because Cloud is literally responsible for both Cloud Spanner and non-Cloud Spanner and they can conflate these two in their marketing copy. They probably feel justified in doing so because they share so much code.

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

#165

Post by mk89 »

tedivm wrote: post #157
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 w…

They very well know that people don't read sh* anymore. Just throw numbers there, PowerPoint them and offer an "unbiased" comparison where Google shines - buy Google.

Worst case scenario, it's Google you're buying, not a random startup etc.

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

#166

Post by btown »

ruuda wrote: post #154
airstrike wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can also create arbitrary indices on derived functions of your JSONB data, which I think is something that a lot of people don't realize. Postgres is a really, really good NoSQL database.

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

#170

Post by jiggawatts »

remus wrote: post #114
JohnMakin wrote: post #30

Cool, too bad I can't rely on Google suddenly deprecating this service.

An internal version has been used within Google since ~2012 and the GCP version has been available since 2017. It's used extensively within Google. It's not going to be deprecated any time soon.

Narrator: it was turned off in 2025.
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