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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

#341

Post by danans »

nerpderp82 wrote: post #260
falcolas wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have an old "quiet part out loud" corporate story. It's about how one arm of Google using our service and wondering why it had so much downtime, only for us to point at their GAE arm and say "when they're down, we're down". They went and talked to GAE and - funny enough - were able to correlate the downtime they observed with GAE downtime. GAE uptime improved, for a little while. Yeah, we're on AWS now too.

Does Google run on GCP?

Yes in the sense that they use all the services and infrastructure that GCP is built in, but no in the sense of using the vanilla GCP interface.

Instead many aspects of GCP's management console are handled by different internal tools, often command line driven. IME they are often far more unwieldy than GCP.

Sometimes this makes sense (far tighter access controls and configuration change controls than a typical company), and some times it's just because of legacy ways of doing things.

I worked on a team at Google that used the internal GCP to serve some code/content for a specific feature, and it was in some ways it was more frustrating than using just either the normal internal systems or just vanilla GCP.

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

#342

Post by FredPret »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #325
FredPret wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get it but I feel like it isn't really mine, and learning this new db/console/product/vendor that won't be around in 10-20-30 years is a waste of very limited time. Linux admin + hosting a server = my data, on my terms, until I keel over, and possibly long after that.

By the time DynamoDB goes away, that Linux server you have will have been EOL for two decades and chock full of security holes, not to mention disks filling up or getting wiped. The amount of time you'll spend tinkering with your server will dwarf the tiny amount of time it'd take to replace DynamoDB with an alternative service.

On the contrary:

- in the next few decades, my Linux servers will have been updated completely multiple times

- software updates happen on my schedule and at my behest

- I can move to newer hardware whenever the mood strikes me

- I maintain full de jure and de facto ownership of my data (AKA I control it completely)

- Since I own the data, I can always upload it to some vendor in future. Due to vendor lock-in, non-standard data formats, and my least favourite: data egress fees, it's not straightforward to go from a vendor to another vendor, or from a vendor to DIY. I maintain maximum optionality

- Since I committed to the private server path, I can take full advantage of the server being a general computing device. I can combine web-hosting, databases, and other things on the same device / a stable of devices. I end up having ridiculous performance, full control of my entire stack, and at a huge discount, and it's a very simple system.

Security concerns are addressed in a couple of ways:

- By having everything on one server, or by architecting things just so, I can stand up a database that does everything I need, including serving my web-apps, without ever facing the public internet directly.

- Maintaining a secure server is admittedly more of an ongoing chore, but it's not a significant timesink at all

- Every online service by AWS et al ultimately runs on a server much like mine, so if there's some serious widespread Linux vulnerability, it'll affect managed services just as much as my server.

- The managed services themselves are not only juicy targets but are themselves vulnerable to both hacking and phishing. I'm convinced SSH'ing into Postgres + Linux is a safer option than a more complicated structure.

All of the above assumes my apps will never be planet-scale, which even in the most bullish case, they never need to be.

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

#343

Post by catch22l »

brianolson wrote: post #11

"as little as $65 USD/month" for GCP Spanner vs AWS Free Tier: "25 GB of data storage ... 2.5 million stream read requests ..." https://aws.amazon.com/dynamodb/pricing/ So, there's probably somewhere the lines on the graph cross, but Google's headline seems misleading.

oh cmon. this is just 50 QPS. i mean yea obviously for someone having as little as 50QPS is not going to bother with the massive scale and availability in cloud spanner. there are a TON of applications today reaching 100M+ users in just a month. you are not dealing with 50QPS. oh and you forgot the crazy byte boundaries in DynamoDB. if you go over a single byte above 1kb, you are charged 2 Read units !

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

#344

Post by catch22l »

dmoy wrote: post #88
Vt71fcAqt7 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very true, but most people do not yet no about scale-to-zero pay-for-what-you-use sql server clouds with a free tier like CockroachDB and neon. They think that you must pay $5 a month to run a sql server, which has been the case until very recently, so they go with no sql options to get the free tier. Edit: actualy Spanner looks like another CockroachDB. You use sql to interact with it. In which case I can see many p…

> Edit: actualy Spanner looks like another CockroachDB. You use sql to interact with it. In which case I can see many people who would want to use this with a free tier for hobby projects. ie. in between education and production development. Pedantically, cockroachDB is another spanner. It was made by Google devs who left Google having previously used spanner, and intentionally made something similar to spanner (ish,…

haha !!!. cockroachDB literally says, their motivation is spanner .. lol

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

#345

Post by catch22l »

avereveard wrote: post #63
ajross wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems nitpicky. The free tier is a marketing program, not a product. "Google should offer intro discounts" is IMHO a very valid point (absolutely no idea why this doesn't exist), but it doesn't really speak to whether or not the real product is more or less expensive.

it's a bit different because the free tier for dynamodb is not like the other 12 month limited offer, it's marketed as free forever, so it's not just an intro product, it's something you can run a small business off for free.

for 50QPS and if you dont cross 1kb read or write. try to do a 2kb payload and see the QPS drop to 20

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

#347

Post by catch22l »

heliodor wrote: post #46
joshe wrote: post #34

A problem for me building on this is that Google Cloud has no coherent strategy. So the price could easily be double or quadruple Amazon in 2 years. Google Maps is the key lesson here. 10 to 20 times price increase, just because someone had a meeting. No justification or coherent strategy, just "sorry here's a shiv to the gut". At least with Amazon, as chaotic as it is, you know that they just mark stuff up to the ma…

This! Google has shown many times they can't be trusted.

such a biased comment. do you think AWS is sitting on 2012 prices ?

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

#348

Post by redditor98654 »

GabeWeiss_ wrote: post #207
brunoborges wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What would have perhaps been a more fair comparison is to share the peak load that Google services running on GCP generated on Spanner, and not the sum of their cloud platform. Not necessarily about volume of transactions, but this is similar to one of my pet-peeves with statements that use aggregated numbers of compute power. "Our system has great performance, dealing 5 billion requests per second" means nothing i…

True, but one would hope that both sides in this case would be putting their best foot forward. Getting peak performance out of right sizing your DB is part of that discussion. I can't imagine AWS would put down "126 million QPS" if they COULD have provided a larger instance that could deliver "200 million QPS", right? We have to assume at some point that both sides are putting their best foot forward given the servi…

The 126M QPS number was certainly parts of Amazon.com retail that powers Prime Day not all of DDB traffic. If we were to add up all of DDB's volume, it would be way higher. At least a magnitude if not more.

Large parts of AWS itself uses DDB - both control plane and data plane. For instance, every message sent to AWS IoT will internally translate to multiple calls to DDB (reads and writes) as the message flows through the different parts of the system. IoT itself is millions of RPS and that is just one small-ish AWS service.

Source: Worked at AWS for 12 years.

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

#350

Post by oarmstrong »

makestuff wrote: post #337
Olreich wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Fargate on EC2? Sorry you’ve lost me, I understood Fargate to be a layer of AWS managed compute for ECS or EKS deliberately instead of EC2.
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