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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

#281
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 lil side project/company! Going to circulate this among friends...

Little bit of well meaning advice: This needs copy editing -- inconsistent use of periods, typos, grammar. Little crap that doesn't matter in the big picture, but will block some from opening their wallets. :) ("OpenTeletry", "performances", etc.)

All in all this is quite cool, and I hope you get some customers and gather more data! (a 4k object size in S3 doesn't make sense to measure, but 1MB might be interesting. Also, check out HDRHistogram, it might be relevant to your interests)

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

#282
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…

Stadia also had paid customers

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

#283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which columnar databases are doing the above in-memory?

SQL Server supports in-memory columnstore tables. I’m not an expert but I suspect SAP HANA also.

If you squint, any database engine is “in memory” if there is more buffer than data.

Or just use a RAM disk!

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

#284
post #148

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.

Golden Rule of data: Use PostgreSQL unless you have an extremely good reason not to. PostgreSQL is extremely good at append-mostly data, i.e like a chat log and has powerful partitioning features that allow you to keep said chat logs for quite some time (with some caveats) while keeping queries fast. Generally speaking though PostgreSQL has powerful features for pretty much every workload, hence the Golden Rule.

Don't forget PostgreSQL extensions. For something like a chat log, TimescaleDB (https://www.timescale.com/) can be surprisingly efficient. It will handle partitioning for you, with additional features like data reordering, compression, and retention policies.

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

#286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Of course, I was simplifying. It's always more complicated doing a migration. :)

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

#288
post #239

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…

Interesting, if you swap GCP and AWS in your post then thats exactly my experience. I wonder what makes us different, I work in europe on video games; AWS’s handling of me when I was at Ubisoft left a really sour taste - when I moved into Tencent/Sharkmob I tried really hard to love AWS as it was the defacto industry standard and instead I was left with a feeling that most of it is inconsistent garbage papered over w…

> I was left with a feeling that most of it is inconsistent garbage papered over with lambda functions

This sounds more like an indictment of the system design than the cloud provider.

What are some of these “3am” topics that made GCP a better choice?

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

#289

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…

Is there any company that hosts Postgres in the cloud (and does nothing else) and has great customer service?

Give https://aiven.io/ a try. But know that I'm biased ;-)

Also https://www.postgresql.org/support/professional_hosting/

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

#290

Meh. Why am I going to sign up for a service that is surely to be canceled on a Google Whim™?

Spanner is probably the least likely thing to ever get cancelled at google by a long shot. It powers basically every single product at google and has been around for many years. I can't think of another Google product that has been around for so long and used internally and externally so heavily besides Gmail (which uses spanner).

It will be deprecated some day.
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