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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

#311
post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

> If you squint, any database engine is “in memory” if there is more buffer than data. That is sadly not true, I remember one lonely night debugging a MSSQL 2012 instance that was _very_ slow, and it turned out that for a simple query (one join, 100 rows in one table and 10 in the other, 100 result in total, one where clause) it forced writing the result to disk before evaluating the WHERE condition. Unable to fight…

Yes, tempdb spills can be annoying, but I believe they never occur for queries that use only in-memory tables.

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

#312

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…

But that's kind of a moot point. I mean, if you're even looking at the likes of DynamoDB or Spanner, it's because you need the scale of those engines. PostgreSQL is fantastic, and even working for Google, I 100% agree with you. Just use PG...until you can't. Once you're in the realm of Spanner and DynamoDB, that's where this discussion becomes more of a thing.

Not necessarily true. DynamoDB on demand pricing is actually way cheaper than RDS or EC2 based anything for small workloads, especially when you want it replicated.

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

#313

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…

My experience too, GCP is frustrating. However, there is nothing like BigQuery to me, I love that DB.

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

#314

but as always: Are you sure your data doesn't fit in PostgreSQL? You should probably try PostgreSQL first.

The more I deal with scalable relational DBMSes (Spanner in particular), the more I doubt their usefulness even at large scale. Relational + fully-consistent are always at odds with scalability. It seems like either you have a classic NoSQL use case and use that, or you shard at the application level rather than in the database.

Could someone share a use case where you truly benefited migrating from Postgres/MySQL to Spanner/Citus/Cockroach, and there was no better solution? I'd like my hunch to be wrong.

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

#315

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 don't know. I like GCP. I have been in an Azure centric corporation for close to two years now and I dearly miss GCP almost every day. My team has a sort of a sandbox where we can use almost any Azure product we want (our IT is supportive and permissive as far as that sandbox goes, which is a blessing), but even then it's just painful in comparison. AWS is probably better though.

Azure seems like a nightmare, regardless of whether GCP or AWS is better.

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

#316
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?

Cloud services rely a ton on marketing, B2B relations, and customer support. Google has never exactly been about that stuff, and GCP was suffering. So they pulled in Oracle, MSFT, etc execs, which lame as that sounds was probably the right move for GCP in particular.

And I guess this is the kind of marketing that attracts the customers they want.

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

#317

But a droplet with a Postgres db is nearly free, and seriously performant. And for 65/month, you can get a VERY beefy Hetzner server. You’ll have to wade through the crazy thicket that is the menu of cloud offerings. I gave that one look, and decided I might as well give up and learn the basics of Linux admin once and apply it for life.

Or you could use DynamoDB for basically free. One month of 1GB of storage, 1kb item size, 100,000 writes, and 100,000 reads, would be $0.39 on DynamoDB on-demand. A million writes and reads respectively would be $1.63. Strongly consistent reads'd make that $1.75, and transactional writes would make it $3.00

Why use dynamo for so few reads?

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

#318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's kind of a moot point. I mean, if you're even looking at the likes of DynamoDB or Spanner, it's because you need the scale of those engines. PostgreSQL is fantastic, and even working for Google, I 100% agree with you. Just use PG...until you can't. Once you're in the realm of Spanner and DynamoDB, that's where this discussion becomes more of a thing.

Not necessarily true. DynamoDB on demand pricing is actually way cheaper than RDS or EC2 based anything for small workloads, especially when you want it replicated.

Fair enough, I'm not (obviously) as familiar with the AWS systems and how the price to performance ratio works out for all the products.

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

#319
post #58
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Postgres is a piece of software. Cloud Spanner/Dynamo etc are managed services. It makes no sense to directly compare one with the other.

Sure, You can compare Cloud SQL vs Cloud Spanner and RDS vs Dynamo, but it makes more sense to just say "Postgres" and assume that the reader can figure out that it means "Whatever managed postgres service you want to use". The entire point is that every cloud provider has a managed postgres offering, and there's no vendor lock-in. Though, technically, Dynamo does have a docker image you could run in other cloud prov…

The dynamodb docker image you’re referring to will get you shot if you try and use it in prod. It’s an API wrapper on top of sqlite and has a ton of missing functionality

There are a couple of databases out there with ddb compatible interfaces, like scylladb

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

#320
post #163
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 shut…

Oh you are in for a surprise

https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprec...

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