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Google Cloud Datastore

cloud.google.com

11–20 of 42 posts

Re: Google Cloud Datastore

#11
post #6

This looks awesome, but I would be hesitant to try it since you can't know if Google will keep the service alive a few years from now.

I don't get this attitude towards commercial Google products. You are a paying customer that is very likely to use other Google cloud services. It would be stupid to annoy a large subset of the paying customers by not providing a clear roadmap of sunsetting. And Google stupid is not. I am excited and will gladly try it on some side projects.

A clear sunsetting roadmap still means that you trusted your business to something Google no longer cares about. It doesn't protect you from the cost of migration.

Re: Google Cloud Datastore

#12
post #2

That looks like an awesome product! Kudos to the team, they truly did a great technical job here! From a market perspective, it kind of makes no sense. I challenge CTO/CIOs to justify building their company on a closed source critical product with no option. While that used to be how things worked in the 90s, I don't think that is as acceptable as it used to be. Maybe the answer is "well it's the only thing that work…

Absolutely agreed. For most companies, a couple instances of MySQL (or PostgreSQL/Oracle/SQLServer) with replication and backup should provide 4 nines uptime (which is probably comparable with what Google/Amazon offers in terms of availability). Throw in a few memcache here and there and you can easily scale up to millions of requests a day. FWIW, even Facebook is running on mysql/memcache.

Re: Google Cloud Datastore

#13
This looks pretty cool.

On the downside it can't do aggregates, it can't do query filters on more than one property, it can't do joins, it has its own unique query language, and it is a proprietary system with no chance of moving to another provider or hosting it yourself.

Speaking of it having its own query language, perhaps that isn't a big deal given you can't do any non-trivial queries.

For me, the pejorative NoSQL claim is actually a marketing turn off.

Re: Google Cloud Datastore

#15
post #2

That looks like an awesome product! Kudos to the team, they truly did a great technical job here! From a market perspective, it kind of makes no sense. I challenge CTO/CIOs to justify building their company on a closed source critical product with no option. While that used to be how things worked in the 90s, I don't think that is as acceptable as it used to be. Maybe the answer is "well it's the only thing that work…

Absolutely agreed. For most companies, a couple instances of MySQL (or PostgreSQL/Oracle/SQLServer) with replication and backup should provide 4 nines uptime (which is probably comparable with what Google/Amazon offers in terms of availability). Throw in a few memcache here and there and you can easily scale up to millions of requests a day. FWIW, even Facebook is running on mysql/memcache.

AFAIK Facebook is no longer running on memcache, they built their own service. Besides, Amazon and Google offer 5 nines which is much better than you can get on a conventional database, not mention the scale.

Re: Google Cloud Datastore

#16
This looks just like Windows Azure Table Service. I'm guessing it has the same limitations such as no joins, aggregates, etc. They're great systems when you ONLY need to store and retrieve things by a single key. They work for some systems, but don't expect it to be your main data-store.

Re: Google Cloud Datastore

#17
post #2

That looks like an awesome product! Kudos to the team, they truly did a great technical job here! From a market perspective, it kind of makes no sense. I challenge CTO/CIOs to justify building their company on a closed source critical product with no option. While that used to be how things worked in the 90s, I don't think that is as acceptable as it used to be. Maybe the answer is "well it's the only thing that work…

Absolutely agreed. For most companies, a couple instances of MySQL (or PostgreSQL/Oracle/SQLServer) with replication and backup should provide 4 nines uptime (which is probably comparable with what Google/Amazon offers in terms of availability). Throw in a few memcache here and there and you can easily scale up to millions of requests a day. FWIW, even Facebook is running on mysql/memcache.

It's not the hardware costs, it's the head count to setup and keep those database instances running, backed up, and tuned. That's the IaaS pitch -- no sysadmin.

As for the vendor lock, most of the datastore API is very similar to other nosql APIs I've seen. It wouldn't be trivial to switch, but not impossible either. I imagine it'd be even easier if you used a orm that is widely supported but I stay away from those, so I couldn't say for sure.

Re: Google Cloud Datastore

#19

This service looks pretty good. After Google dropped Wave, I more or less stopped using AppEngine (useful for Wave robots). I think that their charging a higher price for AppEngine makes it look more appealing (because the service is less likely to be cancelled). Still I was pretty sure I would just go with my own servers and AWS in the future. My opinion changed when I started working as a contractor at Google 2 mon…

What are the key differences between their internal services and what they provide via AppEngine etc.?

Re: Google Cloud Datastore

#20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely agreed. For most companies, a couple instances of MySQL (or PostgreSQL/Oracle/SQLServer) with replication and backup should provide 4 nines uptime (which is probably comparable with what Google/Amazon offers in terms of availability). Throw in a few memcache here and there and you can easily scale up to millions of requests a day. FWIW, even Facebook is running on mysql/memcache.

It's not the hardware costs, it's the head count to setup and keep those database instances running, backed up, and tuned. That's the IaaS pitch -- no sysadmin. As for the vendor lock, most of the datastore API is very similar to other nosql APIs I've seen. It wouldn't be trivial to switch, but not impossible either. I imagine it'd be even easier if you used a orm that is widely supported but I stay away from those,…

In theory I agree with you, but the reality is that even though SQL databases are all on the same "standard" there is enough non-standard things that it in practice becomes impossible for high performance apps.
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