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Google Cloud Spanner is now half the cost of Amazon DynamoDB

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331–340 of 371 posts

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

#331
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.

Photos, Gmail, and Ads use Spanner, not Cloud Spanner.

Apparently Cloud Spanner doesn't support protobuf columns? It would be hard for any internal Google product to use it under that restriction.

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

#332
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Frankly it's a bit weird to see this kind of dick measuring in a product blog post from the "Director of Engineering" :/

s/the "Director of Engineering"/a "Director of Engineering"/ There are many engineering directors at Google.

Director is what, L8? There's a ton of those.

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

#333

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…

Matches my experience. GCP has many better services than AWS but I am not going to run production workload with them after 2 years of experience in previous company. There are so many undocumented quirks that many times you could find better solution from some random person in stackoverflow than highest tier paid support.

That was my experience, too - a couple of things which were better than AWS but this constant stream of paper cuts hitting all of the problems which weren’t cool enough to get someone promoted.

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

#334
post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Small examples included (I’m on my phone so these are from memory and you’ll have to forgive the lack of great detail): 1) having the project/account your in visible at the top at all times. We used SSO for “accounts” which is AWS’s way of completely separating resources; the long string that is returned is not unique in the start and the remainder is cut off: so all accounts/projects looked the same, was impossible…

> 1) having the project/account your in visible at the top at all times. I agree that this is an annoying issue in the AWS web console. I assume this is something that could be fixed on your end by a little bit of CSS.

I believe the solution is to give the account an alias.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/IAM/latest/UserGuide/console_acc...

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

#336
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

just migrated off of PG to ddb as the main db for my application (still copying data to SQL for data analytics). Working with distributed functions and code hosted on lambdas, the connection management to SQL became a nightmare with dropped requests all over the place.

Sacrificing a real DB to use serverless is exactly why serverless makes zero sense.

Yeah I have been using Supabase recently and I really like it. You still get the “serverless” benefits but at the end of the day it is just a Postgres database with some plugins. It is super easy to figure out where the data is coming from/going to.

Meanwhile at work I have a cowoker who loves to create AWS soup where they use an assortment of lambdas/api gateways/sqs queues/sns topics to accomplish tasks such as taking files from one s3 bucket and putting them in another s3 bucket owned by a different team. Their justification of this was that it was generic so other teams could use it, but it is a pain to maintain and make changes to.

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

#337
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your mileage may vary, but I think in majority of the cases Fargate is going to be significantly more expensive than Lambda.

Lambda is the most expensive thing you can do if you have more than 25% utilization. Fargate is extremely close to modern on-demand EC2 pricing (m7a family).

Yeah you can run Fargate on EC2 now as well to optimize cost even further.

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

#338
post #293
post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Small examples included (I’m on my phone so these are from memory and you’ll have to forgive the lack of great detail): 1) having the project/account your in visible at the top at all times. We used SSO for “accounts” which is AWS’s way of completely separating resources; the long string that is returned is not unique in the start and the remainder is cut off: so all accounts/projects looked the same, was impossible…

we fix that internally by having names for accounts and having stages for accounts in a meta tool. There's a tampermonkey script that pulls that in and shows it on screen and a red banner if it's prod. Could be a json file in a github repo. And yes it could be a console feature but everyone's got different concepts of prod. I think a ton of companies use like 2 total accounts as well.

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

#339

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…

There is no way this is true. Only explanation is you work for AWS :-). GCP strength is it's cost. Yes may be the support could be better. But can you care to explain what "hacks" are you talking about ? And the claim that K8S(from Google) is better on AWS than GCP is absolutely false

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

#340

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…

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.

Seems to me like there are still plenty of relationships in a chat app. Postgres can be used like a NoSQL database via JSONB too if you want.

I think the truth is that you should use the simplest, most effective tech possible until you are absolutely certain you need something more niche.

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