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this is pretty weird for me to hear, as a developer on a project with 3000+ monthly average users where DynamoDB is my only database and the costs are in the hu

this is pretty weird for me to hear, as a developer on a project with 3000+ monthly average users where DynamoDB is my only database and the costs are in the hundreds per month. I'm sure that any database can be "too expensive" if your access patterns are out-of-this-world intense, but it's very difficult to compare apples to apples when we have no idea how beefy the PostreSQL instance to support your cache would have been.

pier25 6y ago
> DynamoDB is my only database and the costs are in the hundreds per month Is your use case very DB intense? Seems quite high just to support a couple thousand users.
- redis_mlc 6y ago
  Most busy sites have to put Redis/Elasticache in front of Dynamodb, or do app caching of hot keys, to save money. Typically 90% less.
- ledauphin 6y ago
  pretty intense, yes. for each user who uses it, they take several hundreds of actions per day that each require a database write. we could optimize those but it's not worth it.
  - tluyben2 6y ago
    Like you said, hard to compare apples-apples without more info but couple 1000 users with 100s of writes/user/day sounds like it would handle fine on a $1/month vps (we have far higher workloads running few $1/mo, if I understand you correctly). Not saying that you should spend time on that; it's probably insignificant on the p&l, however, other people should know there are alternatives still and aws is not always, automatically, the right choice (in my mind, it almost never is actually).
    - pier25 6y ago
      > sounds like it would handle fine on a $1/month vps You need someone to manage that VPS though and that costs a lot more than $1 per month.
      - tluyben2 6y ago
        How is that different from managing aws? Because in my experience (of 20+ years) there isn't any for most projects. There are reasons to pick aws, but, for most of them, this is not one of them.
        pier25 6y ago
        I guess it depends on what AWS services you're using and how complex is your usage. If you're only using Dynamo you shouldn't need that much management, or if you're using Fauna you need zero management.
jcims 6y ago
This was for some analytics against WARC files with 60 container tasks running for ~5 hrs

pier25 6y ago

> DynamoDB is my only database and the costs are in the hundreds per month Is your use case very DB intense? Seems quite high just to support a couple thousand users.

redis_mlc 6y ago
Most busy sites have to put Redis/Elasticache in front of Dynamodb, or do app caching of hot keys, to save money. Typically 90% less.
ledauphin 6y ago
pretty intense, yes. for each user who uses it, they take several hundreds of actions per day that each require a database write. we could optimize those but it's not worth it.
- tluyben2 6y ago
  Like you said, hard to compare apples-apples without more info but couple 1000 users with 100s of writes/user/day sounds like it would handle fine on a $1/month vps (we have far higher workloads running few $1/mo, if I understand you correctly). Not saying that you should spend time on that; it's probably insignificant on the p&l, however, other people should know there are alternatives still and aws is not always, automatically, the right choice (in my mind, it almost never is actually).
  - pier25 6y ago
    > sounds like it would handle fine on a $1/month vps You need someone to manage that VPS though and that costs a lot more than $1 per month.
    - tluyben2 6y ago
      How is that different from managing aws? Because in my experience (of 20+ years) there isn't any for most projects. There are reasons to pick aws, but, for most of them, this is not one of them.
      - pier25 6y ago
        I guess it depends on what AWS services you're using and how complex is your usage. If you're only using Dynamo you shouldn't need that much management, or if you're using Fauna you need zero management.

jcims 6y ago

This was for some analytics against WARC files with 60 container tasks running for ~5 hrs