Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google Cloud Spanner is now half the cost of Amazon DynamoDB

cloud.google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 371 posts

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

#251

Post by cameronh90 »

pirsquare wrote: post #195
vicpara wrote: post #182

Just moved our infra from GCP to AWS. Kubernetes clusters, LB, storage, lambdas, KMS and all of it. Google runs their tech stack as if it's a startup that builds their CV. Everything is immature, tons of hacks, undocumented features. If you are on their k8s there are tons of upcoming new versions and features that force you to revisit key hacks you put in your infra because of their misgivings. Our infra team keeps t…

> AWS support is so nice, you can't believe it. This! They even custom-coded their support portal better than those off-the-shelf vendor like Zendesk. I say this as a Zendesk paying customer. GCP on the other hand, is a F-tier in support. Almost feel like I need to beg them to get any level of help.

At one point, Google reached out to me to try and tempt us over from AWS. I had bad experiences with Google support in the past, but liked their AI stuff and was keen to give them another go.

We booked a follow up call in the calendar, I spent good time preparing my notes and requirements for the meeting... and then nobody on their side showed up or contacted me again.

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

#252

Post by GabeWeiss_ »

goeldhru wrote: post #36

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

The DeWitt clause is only there to prevent badly written performance data from getting attention it shouldn't. If anyone writes a good benchmark (good process, not good results, necessarily) to bring to us, our product teams absolutely will consider it.

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

#253

Post by YetAnotherNick »

agonz253 wrote: post #227
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…

It's not purely a matter of cost, right? Say you want or need a highly available, high performance distributed database with externally consistent semantics. Are you going to handle the sharding of your Postgres data yourself? What replication system will you use for each shard? How will you ensure strong consistency? Will you be able to do transactions across shards? These are problems that systems like Spanner, Coc…

Just curious, why would distributed be design requirement? Is individual machine failure likely in AWS/GCP? The only failure I have seen in region level issues which spanner or dynamo don't help with AFAIK.

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

#254

Post by GabeWeiss_ »

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.

You can! Spanner has a free trial: https://cloud.google.com/spanner/docs/free-trial-instance. Keep in mind, that per-request pricing isn't free unless you stay under the free tier. So just take a look at what those limits are because going above them means you're not free anymore.

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

#255

Post by GabeWeiss_ »

baridbelmedar wrote: post #26

I'm really excited about this as a customer. We're probably going to be able to save a lot of money because of it. So now, with the new Postgres compatibility layer and the "lower cost", it will be easier for me to choose Spanner when we start new projects.

Really glad to hear! Please find me on social media or LinkedIn and let me know how it goes for you using the PG layer. I'd love to hear more feedback.

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

#256

Post by Cthulhu_ »

pirsquare wrote: post #195
vicpara wrote: post #182

Just moved our infra from GCP to AWS. Kubernetes clusters, LB, storage, lambdas, KMS and all of it. Google runs their tech stack as if it's a startup that builds their CV. Everything is immature, tons of hacks, undocumented features. If you are on their k8s there are tons of upcoming new versions and features that force you to revisit key hacks you put in your infra because of their misgivings. Our infra team keeps t…

> AWS support is so nice, you can't believe it. This! They even custom-coded their support portal better than those off-the-shelf vendor like Zendesk. I say this as a Zendesk paying customer. GCP on the other hand, is a F-tier in support. Almost feel like I need to beg them to get any level of help.

Wouldn't Zendesk be one of those software things that has had too many features bolted on without oversight and/or a unified philosophy behind it?

I'm of the opinion that focused products created by smaller teams are better.

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

#257

Post by doesnt_know »

vicpara wrote: post #182

Just moved our infra from GCP to AWS. Kubernetes clusters, LB, storage, lambdas, KMS and all of it. Google runs their tech stack as if it's a startup that builds their CV. Everything is immature, tons of hacks, undocumented features. If you are on their k8s there are tons of upcoming new versions and features that force you to revisit key hacks you put in your infra because of their misgivings. Our infra team keeps t…

> AWS support is so nice, you can't believe it.

It's actually sort of ridiculous. AWS has the best support I have ever interacted with. I mean, our org certainly pays enough for it but it's so completely unusual in tech, or really any sector to get great support even when you're paying for it.

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

#258

Post by qwertox »

iot_devs wrote: post #233
ljm wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used DynamoDB as part of the job a few years ago and never got single-millisecond responses - it was 20ms minimum and 70+ on a cold-start, but I can accept that optimising Dynamo's various indexes is a largely opaque process. We had to add on hacks like setting the request timeout to 5ms and keeping the cluster warm by submitting a no-op query every 500ms to keep it even remotely stable. We couldn't even use DAX be…

No need to guess when you can measure. I am running https://cloud-canary.com a service where I monitor AWS primary services for latency and availability. It comes with a lot of data. For instance this is the latency I see doing operations against Dynamo. https://cloudcanary.grafana.net/public-dashboards/c53e2092d6...

What a cool service. Congratulations!

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

#259

Post by GabeWeiss_ »

aa_is_op wrote: post #18

But twice as complex to use, though. That GCP interface is cancer. You need a Google-to-English dictionary to understand it.

Tell me more (bonus points if you find me on LinkedIn or other social because tracking comment responses on HN is really rough). I'd love feedback you have so I can bring it back to the product team!

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

#260

Post by nerpderp82 »

falcolas wrote: post #246
vicpara wrote: post #182

Just moved our infra from GCP to AWS. Kubernetes clusters, LB, storage, lambdas, KMS and all of it. Google runs their tech stack as if it's a startup that builds their CV. Everything is immature, tons of hacks, undocumented features. If you are on their k8s there are tons of upcoming new versions and features that force you to revisit key hacks you put in your infra because of their misgivings. Our infra team keeps t…

We have an old "quiet part out loud" corporate story. It's about how one arm of Google using our service and wondering why it had so much downtime, only for us to point at their GAE arm and say "when they're down, we're down". They went and talked to GAE and - funny enough - were able to correlate the downtime they observed with GAE downtime. GAE uptime improved, for a little while. Yeah, we're on AWS now too.

Does Google run on GCP?
Post reply on HN