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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

#271

Post by GabeWeiss_ »

vineyardmike wrote: post #212
GabeWeiss_ wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just as a hand in the air...Be careful about what you're comparing here. # of API calls over a period of time is...largely irrelevant in the face of QPS. I can happily write a DDOS script that massively bombards a service, but if that halts my QPS then it doesn't matter. So sure, trillions of API calls were made (still impressive in the scope of the overall network of services, I'm not downplaying that), but ultimate…

Google calls API calls “queries”… because of their history as a search engine. QPS == API calls/per second == Requests per second That said, I can’t imagine these numbers mean much to anyone after a certain point. It’s not like either company is running a single service handling them. The scale is limited by their budget and access to servers because my traffic shouldn’t impact yours. I feel like the better number is…

Yes, but QPS vs. "queries to the API". The difference is the time slice. I should have been more explicit. The key here really is the time function between the numbers. That the AWS blog calls out trillions of API calls isn't relevant because there wasn't a specific time denominator. The 126M QPS is the important stat.

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

#272

Post by tyree731 »

victor106 wrote: post #172
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…

> But I've also been feeling burned a bit by Google suddenly ending services. The products/services that “Google” the search company launches are different than “Google Cloud”. While the discontinuation of Google products is annoying it has nothing to do with Google Cloud products/services. I don’t think Google Cloud abruptly announces discontinuing products/services as they have paid customers. Regarding Google Doma…

Jamboard had paying customers, and they discontinued that on short notice, so paying only gets you so far.

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

#273

Post by hintymad »

smueller1234 wrote: post #209
hintymad wrote: post #177

Does Google Cloud Spanner use the Spanner database per the 2013 paper? Or does Google simply use the brand and implement a cheaper and more performant db under the hood? I suspect it is the latter because most companies do not need global consistency anyway, so it may make sense to relax parts of what Spanner was originally built for.

Yes, it's the same Spanner that's used internally. But obviously it's progressed hugely since 2013.

Amazing. And thanks for clarification

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

#274

Post by jeffbee »

vxNsr wrote: post #214
gregdoesit wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In the timestamped video link shared downthread, the speaker does seem to strongly imply that gWorkspace doesn’t manage the infra, when he finishes explaining the migration he declares (around 55:18)“[…]we can focus on the business of gmail and spanner can choose to improve and deliver performance gains automagically[sic]” which would imply, to me at least, that it’s on GCP.

That's not what it implied to me. To me, it meant that they adopted an internal managed Spanner with its own SRE team, instead of running their own Spanner. In the past, Gmail ran their own [[redacted]]s and [[redacted]] even though there were company-wide managed services for those things.

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

#275

Post by oars »

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?

Google Cloud's current CEO spent 22 years at Oracle before taking this role.

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

#276

Post by QuercusMax »

GabeWeiss_ wrote: post #265
nerpderp82 wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Google run on GCP?

Parts, yes. In reference to the specifics mentioned in here though, those services run on Infra Spanner, not Cloud Spanner, but they're the same stack. The main reason things like Gmail, Ads, etc haven't swapped into GCP is because of the internal tooling that's built up around the infra spanner relating to those services specific to Google that don't make sense in Cloud Spanner.

It's way WAY more than just Infra Spanner vs Cloud Spanner. Cloud spanner doesn't support protobuf, which is annoying, but that's not a dealbreaker; it's still just a DB. The issue is really all the various internal frameworks (such as Apps Framework for Java), deployment systems (Server Platform, AKA Boq/Pod/Urfin), and so forth.

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

#277

Post by arpinum »

rkeene2 wrote: post #78
joshuanapoli wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly: I have to provision for peak throughput on Spanner. Average throughput is much lower than the peak throughput, so I'm doubtful of seeing savings no Spanner. (But I bet that Spanner is much easier than DynamoDB to develop with...)

You can scale Spanner up/down based on demand although there is a lag time with it. I built a system that relies on a high-performance database and tested with both AWS DynamoDB and Google Cloud Spanner (see disclaimer) and was able to scale Google Cloud Spanner much higher than AWS DynamoDB. DynamoDB is limited to 1000 WRUs per node, and there isn't an obvious way to get more than 100 nodes per table, so you're limi…

> and there isn't an obvious way to get more than 100 nodes per table

By node you mean partition, and a partition is limited to 10GB. Store more than 1TB and you will have at least 100 partitions

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

#278

Post by g9yuayon »

tacozilla wrote: post #238
g9yuayon wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At Amazon, practically every service is built on top of AWS - a proper vote of confidence! Not only this, but practically most, if not all, of the AWS services use DynamoDB, including use cases that are usually not for databases, such as multi-tenant job queues (just search "Database as a Queue" to get the sentiment). In fact, it is really really hard to use any relational DB in AWS. I mean, a team would have to go…

Eh, this isn't accurate. Both Redshift and Aurora/RDS are used heavily by a lot of teams internally. If you're talking specifically about the primary data store for live applications, NoSQL was definitely recommended/pushed much harder than SQL, but it by no means required CEO approval to not use DDB Edit: It's possible you're limiting your statement specifically to AWS teams, which would make it more accurate, but I…

Yeah, within AWS. I'm not sure about other parts of Amazon

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

#279

Post by softveda »

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…

I worked in a Digital team 4 years back where the team was building voice channel apps for our customers on both Amazon Alexa and Google Dialogflow. Alexa NLP engine was less sophisticated we had to give it hundreds of prompts and intents. Dialogflow NLP engine required a handful of prompts for the same thing. But when it came to integration with backend APIs and support Alexa was far ahead. Despite having Dialogflow enterprise Google support would suggest to ask in StackOverflow. Amazon support on the other hand was excellent. We needed support for mTLS with the backend APIs, Amazon supported it as they understood enterprise. Google just shooed us away, their support wouldn’t even escalate this.

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

#280

Post by traceroute66 »

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 a bug reported back in 2020 that got closed recently without any action because it became stale

One of my pet hates is the (ab)use by repo maintainers of the auto-close-when-stale feature on Github.

What useful purpose does it serve beyond making the repo maintainers look good because they have a low number of open issues ?

It doesn't actually address the issue. Its the virtual equivalent of brushing under the carpet.

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