15 ms·

Google Cloud Spanner is now half the cost of Amazon DynamoDB

311 points by forrestbrazeal 3y ago

thedougd 3y ago
I look forward to the AWS pricing reduction.
mmanfrin 3y ago
Google also has a history of massively spiking the cost of its services. Vendor lockin is a dangerous thing.
- xnx 3y ago
  This definitely happened with Google Maps, where Google was clearly the dominant player. Has it happened to other services? It seems far less likely to happen for business cloud services where they are a distance 2nd (3rd?) to AWS. I know of some examples (admittedly ancient) where they have reduced costs: https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2015/05/Pay-Less-Compute-Moore.html https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2015/05/Pay-Less-Comput...
  - callalex 3y ago
    Before they offered Google cloud, they offered Google App Engine. After they introduced Google Cloud they got bored of App Engine and 10x’d the price. This was particularly painful because App Engine was a batteries-included solution with heavy vendor lock-in.
    - xnx 3y ago
      Good history lesson. I didn't realize that Google Cloud wasn't a rename/expansion of Google App Engine.
      - dragonwriter 3y ago
        But, Google Cloud was a rename/expansion (specifically, expansion) of Google App Engine (GAE a pre-existing Google products that was then part of Google Cloud when the latter brand was launched.)
    - derefr 3y ago
      > After they introduced Google Cloud they got bored of App Engine and 10x’d the price. I don't know about "got bored of"; I'd say more "effectively deprecated, using increasing costs† as an implicit push toward rewriting your service for more modern parts of their platform." Specifically, Google want you to rewrite your GAE apps for Cloud Run (https://cloud.google.com/appengine/migration-center/run/compare-gae-with-run https://cloud.google.com/appengine/migration-center/run/comp...): > Cloud Run is the latest evolution of Google Cloud Serverless, building on the experience of running App Engine for more than a decade. Cloud Run runs on much of the same infrastructure as App Engine standard environment, so there are many similarities between these two platforms. > Cloud Run is designed to improve upon the App Engine experience, incorporating many of the best features of both App Engine standard environment and App Engine flexible environment. Cloud Run services can handle the same workloads as App Engine services, but Cloud Run offers customers much more flexibility in implementing these services. This flexibility, along with improved integrations with both Google Cloud and third-party services, also enables Cloud Run to handle workloads that cannot run on App Engine. Anyone who's still on GAE (rather than having moved over to Cloud Run) at this point is a "legacy enterprise customer"; and so Google have at this point moved GAE pricing beyond just a monetary disincentive to use, to being "fired-customer pricing" — i.e. the price you charge when you don't really want to work with a customer any more, a price that says "go away", but if they still want to pay you even at that price-point, then sure, why not?
  - acdha 3y ago
    The last year has had multiple GCP cost increases: https://cloud.google.com/storage/pricing-announce https://cloud.google.com/storage/pricing-announce https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/updates-to-google-clouds-infrastructure-pricing https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/update... https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/data-analytics/introducing-new-bigquery-pricing-editions https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/data-analytics/introd... https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing-announce https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing-announce https://cloud.google.com/vpc/pricing-announce https://cloud.google.com/vpc/pricing-announce
  - logicchains 3y ago
    >Has it happened to other services? BigQuery initially was a lot more powerful, then they started adding a bunch of resource limits on queries that you could only overcome by paying up. Not a direct fee increase, rather you paid the same fee for a worse product.
- Tehnix 3y ago
  Curious: have they ever increased prices of existing Google Cloud services? As far as I know, AWS only ever decreases prices on services for example
  - jefftk 3y ago
    AWS has increased prices, most recently when they started charging for static IPs (even ones attached to a running instance).
    - tpmx 3y ago
      That one caused a week of work for me... (redesigning something slated to go live in a few months)
  - tpmx 3y ago
    GCP has seen price increases: https://techcrunch.com/2022/03/14/inflation-is-real-google-cloud-raises-its-storage-prices/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/03/14/inflation-is-real-google-c... Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30671997 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30671997
  - rlpb 3y ago
    "Coders howl over Google's App Engine price hike (natch)" https://www.theregister.com/2011/09/02/google_app_engine_users_on_pricing_change/ https://www.theregister.com/2011/09/02/google_app_engine_use... I don't know if Google App Engine falls under Google Cloud services, but either way that's just a technicality; the sentiment remains the same. Edit: more information here: https://github.com/stickfigure/blog/wiki/The-Unofficial-Google-App-Engine-Price-Change-FAQ https://github.com/stickfigure/blog/wiki/The-Unofficial-Goog...
    - packetslave 3y ago
      TWELVE YEARS AGO! find a new complaint.
      - 3y ago
- Freedom2 3y ago
  Is there any evidence of vendor lock-in actually being a widespread issue?
- holografix 3y ago
  Source?
andrewedstrom 3y ago
Not pictured: the cost of switching to DynamoDB when this service inevitably gets shut down in two years.
- vlovich123 3y ago
  There’s no way spanner gets shut down. It’s critical to so much of Google’s internal infra.
  - johncessna 3y ago
    That doesn't address GCP itself getting shut down in 2 years.
    - art-not 3y ago
      Is there a reason to believe this will happen?
    - goldfish3 3y ago
      Lol. The people you find on Hacker News sometimes...
    - vlovich123 3y ago
      I really doubt that. They’re starting to finally turn a profit ($200 million) and it’s a 8 billion in revenue a quarter line of business. Google shuts down businesses that aren’t as revenue generating but 8 billion a quarter (32B annually) is a massive business and the “losses” are likely mostly from R&D reinvestments to keep growing that line of business.
    - mattzito 3y ago
      GCP is profitable and growing 27% YoY. It made more money than YouTube ads did in Q2 2023. In what world would it make sense to shut down GCP at this point? I think the "google shuts things down" trope is justified and something that I wince at every time I see something like this, but GCP isn't a random pet project that loses money and has no users. It's a very successful enterprise business. (disclaimer: I work at google in cloud, so obviously I have personal bias, but this is just my opinion based on the pure numbers.)
grogenaut 3y ago
if they're cutting the price they are likely worried about the product... are they going to cancel it like every other product they've released?
- nickstinemates 3y ago
  They didn't cut the price. They increased performance and are claiming half price to a similar workload on Amazon. Titles a little disingenuous.
spullara 3y ago
Without an on-demand version of spanner that doesn't charge per node but per operation makes it not comparable to dynamodb for many use cases.
- joshuanapoli 3y ago
  Exactly: I have to provision for peak throughput on Spanner. Average throughput is much lower than the peak throughput, so I'm doubtful of seeing savings no Spanner. (But I bet that Spanner is much easier than DynamoDB to develop with...)
  - rkeene2 3y ago
    You can scale Spanner up/down based on demand although there is a lag time with it. I built a system that relies on a high-performance database and tested with both AWS DynamoDB and Google Cloud Spanner (see disclaimer) and was able to scale Google Cloud Spanner much higher than AWS DynamoDB. DynamoDB is limited to 1000 WRUs per node, and there isn't an obvious way to get more than 100 nodes per table, so you're limited to 100,000 WRUs per table (= 102400000 bytes/sec = 97 MiB/sec = 776 Mib/sec) -- even if you reserve more than 100,000 WRUs in capacity for the table. The obvious workaround would be to shard the data across multiple tables, but that would have made the software more difficult to use. Google Cloud Spanner was able to do much more than 97 MiB/sec in traffic (though the exact amount isn't yet public), and also was capable of much larger transactions (100 MiB versus DynamoDB's 25 (now it is 100) items * 400KiB of ~10 MiB) which was a bonus. Disclaimer: The work was funded by a former Google CEO and I worked with the Google Spanner team on setting it up, while I am a former AWS employee I didn't work with AWS on the DynamoDB part of it, though I did normal quota adjustments.
    - ripper1138 3y ago
      Doesn’t seem like a fair comparison.
    - arpinum 3y ago
      > and there isn't an obvious way to get more than 100 nodes per table By node you mean partition, and a partition is limited to 10GB. Store more than 1TB and you will have at least 100 partitions
benmanns 3y ago
I wish I could play around with Spanner for personal/side projects, but a production ready instance starts at $65/mo. DynamoDB can run for ~$0.00/month with per-request pricing.
- meowtimemania 3y ago
  This is the main reason I like DynamoDB. I can run side projects indefinitely for basically $0/month.
  - iends 3y ago
    Same as with lambda. I have a side project that costs $0.42/mo to run.
- GabeWeiss_ 3y ago
  You can! Spanner has a free trial: https://cloud.google.com/spanner/docs/free-trial-instance https://cloud.google.com/spanner/docs/free-trial-instance. Keep in mind, that per-request pricing isn't free unless you stay under the free tier. So just take a look at what those limits are because going above them means you're not free anymore.
- michellegienow 3y ago
  if you are interested in spanner, you might take a look at cockroachdb. esp the production ready serverless offering which is pay for consumption only. crdb architecture is essentially spanner under the bonnet, GIFFE https://www.cockroachlabs.com/get-started-cockroachdb/ https://www.cockroachlabs.com/get-started-cockroachdb/
brianolson 3y ago
"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/ https://aws.amazon.com/dynamodb/pricing/ So, there's probably somewhere the lines on the graph cross, but Google's headline seems misleading.
- hdjjhhvvhga 3y ago
  The Free Tier is completely irrelevant here, though. The very reason someone might use Spanner is its excellent scalability. I don't believe there is any reason to use it for smaller projects other than education. The customers who will use Spanners are those for whom CockroachDB is not enough, for example. For everybody with databases that are not that huge PostgreSQL will do just fine.
  - Vt71fcAqt7 3y ago
    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 people who would want to use this with a free tier for hobby projects. ie. in between education and production development.
    - dmoy 3y ago
      > 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, lots of handwaving happening here)
      - 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
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TheTaO 3y ago
That headline is half truth. Price of a cloud database depends on so many things. what is the I/O, what is the storage utilization, cross-region traffic, etc. Picking one scenario and claiming the cost to be half is too simplistic and a marketing gimmick.
- idunno246 3y ago
  Also which dynamo price are they comparing to? On demand? Provisioned? Reserved provisioned? We had a huge spanner db with low throughput so had to add idle nodes just for storage which also ballooned costs for spanner(the increased storage size here helps)
TedDoesntTalk 3y ago
…until it’s canceled
nameless912 3y ago
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. Just...use Postgres.
- teaearlgraycold 3y ago
  Postgres is the database God himself would have made.
  - nameless912 3y ago
    Like, I don't want to fanboy, but it's _hard_ to find a use case that postgres can't handle at small to medium (i.e. 90% of projects) scale.
    - 0xbadcafebee 3y ago
      It's hard to find a use case that a plain old filesystem can't handle at small to medium scale. But there are perhaps more important considerations than just "can it handle it"
      - diordiderot 3y ago
        Like what? (Genuinely curious)
    - pier25 3y ago
      Probably more like 99%
    - nvm0n2 3y ago
      Uh let's not get carried away. It's fine with enough work maybe. But Postgres has a lot of awkwardness too. HA is a pain, major version upgrades are a pain, JS or JVM stored procs are a pain, configuring auth is a pain. There is a reason so many people are desperate to pay someone else to run Postgres for them instead of just renting a few VMs and doing it themselves.
brianolson 3y ago
but as always: Are you sure your data doesn't fit in PostgreSQL? You should probably try PostgreSQL first.
- bananapub 3y ago
  that really should be the first heuristic for almost any systems design problem - if you can afford to buy a big enough pair of machines to fit your data in hot-swap postgres then just do that. don't bother with mongo or mysql or dynamo or cassandra or bigtable or spanner or ... until your lack of profitability or size means you can't afford to just use postgres.
  - meowtimemania 3y ago
    What do you mean "can't afford to just use postgres"? I thought postgres cost per query in many cases is cheaper than competitors.
    - bananapub 3y ago
      > What do you mean "can't afford to just use postgres"? if I have 10TB of hot data, can I afford two machines with 10T of RAM each? how about 100T? > I thought postgres cost per query in many cases is cheaper than competitors. that's not really a useful metric without size/latency/etc attached to it, being cheap for 0.1qps might be fine for a YC company but that's no good for my successful company etc
      - meowtimemania 3y ago
        Makes sense. Thanks for the response!
- hot_gril 3y ago
  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.
aa_is_op 3y ago
But twice as complex to use, though. That GCP interface is cancer. You need a Google-to-English dictionary to understand it.
- icedchai 3y ago
  AWS is really no better. Both consoles are a mess in their own ways. CLIs are really what matters, though. In general, I have found the GCP command line (“gcloud”) easier to work with.
- GabeWeiss_ 3y ago
  Tell me more (bonus points if you find me on LinkedIn or other social because tracking comment responses on HN is really rough). I'd love feedback you have so I can bring it back to the product team!
dastbe 3y ago
where’s the worked examples, forrestbrazeal
baridbelmedar 3y ago
I'm really excited about this as a customer. We're probably going to be able to save a lot of money because of it. So now, with the new Postgres compatibility layer and the "lower cost", it will be easier for me to choose Spanner when we start new projects.
- GabeWeiss_ 3y ago
  Really glad to hear! Please find me on social media or LinkedIn and let me know how it goes for you using the PG layer. I'd love to hear more feedback.
guluarte 3y ago
99% of the projects dont need dynamodb/spanner/ScyllaDB
- theshrike79 3y ago
  DynamoDB has a free tier. I've been running a semi-active app wholly on the free tier for a good 3-4 years now. Lambda is free too. I think the only thing I pay for is API Gateway, and that's around $2 a month max.
  - meowtimemania 3y ago
    Have you considered doing CloudFront --> Lambda Function URL? Would that lower your costs?
- PeterCorless 3y ago
  DynamoDB and ScyllaDB are very different use cases than Spanner. • Spanner is more in the domain of CockroachDB — distributed strong consistency and ACID compliance. Both are ANSI SQL. • DynamoDB and ScyllaDB are in the NoSQL key-value store / wide column domain. ScyllaDB is API compatible with DynamoDB, but is also API compatible with Cassandra Query Language (CQL). These databases are for eventual consistency use cases. As to the "99%" comment, there are over 415 databases currently tracked on DB-engines.com (https://db-engines.com/en/ranking https://db-engines.com/en/ranking). It is a very competitive and specialized industry. Very few databases have more than 1% marketshare these days. According to this: https://6sense.com/tech/relational-databases https://6sense.com/tech/relational-databases ...only the top 9 options show >1% of marketshare. MySQL being so far in the lead (42%) is far more likely due to it being baked into so many OEM deals (over 2,000 as per https://www.mysql.com/oem/ https://www.mysql.com/oem/). Like, every WordPress site in the world than anything else. Yet that doesn't really make MySQL great for every use cases. It has obvious limitations. We also have to note that different studies have far different results. In this video: https://statisticsanddata.org/data/the-most-popular-databases-2006-2023/ https://statisticsanddata.org/data/the-most-popular-database... It shows a different set of top databases, and has 11 of them showing >2% of marketshare. It has MySQL at only 13.91% of marketshare, with Oracle being on top at 31.19%. The source of this poll is TOPDB Top Database index: https://pypl.github.io/DB.html https://pypl.github.io/DB.html It's not based on money marketshare, nor on poll results, but simply is counting how often a database is searched on Google. Note that anything that could garner 1% of the market would suddenly catapult that database into the top 16th place on the list. At the end of the day, database "market share" — however it is calculated — is not representative of exclusive percentages. Many companies run more than 1 type of database. There might even be multiple SQL and NoSQL databases, each designed for purpose, at large enterprises. OLTP, OLAP. I would not be surprisedi in the least to learn that large corporations had well over 100 different databases running at any given time. So, back to your basic comment: if a database is useful for even 1% of the use cases, that would still place it in the top 20 databases in the industry. Moreover, a lowest-common denominator database will not be able to support many critical use cases where you really do need a specialized data model, or index type, or query language, or workload type, or latency, or distribution, or scale of QPS/TPS/OPS, or total data size or query payload size, etc. I have likened the database industry to the state of Christianity after the Reformation. Even if there are still plenty of "Catholics" (classic SQL adherent, like Oracle), there are also Reformed faiths ("NewSQL" / "Distributed SQL", e.g., PostgreSQL), plus any number of Protestant reformation alternatives (NoSQL). I'm not sure what the "Orthodox" in this analogy refers to. Maybe SQL data warehouses? The schism between OLTP and OLAP? Dunno. Anyway, it's an analogy. Bound to break down at some point. At the end of the day, my advice: use the database most closely aligned to the dataset and workload and use case you have at hand. Don't just throw something at a problem because it's a popular choice, or because it's the database you happen to be most familiar with.
JohnMakin 3y ago
Cool, too bad I can't rely on Google suddenly deprecating this service.
- remus 3y ago
  An internal version has been used within Google since ~2012 and the GCP version has been available since 2017. It's used extensively within Google. It's not going to be deprecated any time soon.
  - jiggawatts 3y ago
    Narrator: it was turned off in 2025.
revel 3y ago
This thread is already a damning indictment of google cloud. Price cuts alone won't attract customers -- google has sustained significant reputational damage with their crappy customer service and support. That's hard to fix
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- clumsysmurf 3y ago
  I've been doing Android development since 1.0, many Android developers are unhappy with the abusive "relationship" they have with Google, because of their control over the Play Store, your developer account, and resolving things if they come up. I'd pick any non-Google tech if there was an alternative.
  - airstrike 3y ago
    Are iOS developers happy with Apple's control over the App Store, their developer account, and resolving things if they come up?
- kubb 3y ago
  Yes, but also every 3 out of 4 people here have applied to work for Google, and most got rejected, so that can contribute to the negative sentiment. Spanner is a pretty solid database, it checks all the boxes: consistency, geographic replication and transactional updates are not present at the same time in most large scale db's out there.
joshe 3y ago
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 margin they want and let the market sort out what gets used. Google is into secretive grand strategy that changes completely anytime 4 product managers get together in a room.
- heliodor 3y ago
  This! Google has shown many times they can't be trusted.
  - catch22l 3y ago
    such a biased comment. do you think AWS is sitting on 2012 prices ?
- emodendroket 3y ago
  Yegge had an article saying that Google had really good tools to clean up uses of deprecated calls and the like and this had made them way too cavalier about breaking changes. Can't vouch for it but an interesting dynamic.
  - vlovich123 3y ago
    I mean, a common joke among ICs at Google is that the API or service you're calling is deprecated but the replacement system isn't ready yet. They have good tools, but the cavalierness about breaking changes would be more because teams can just say "not supported" anymore for internal APIs and services, a more thorough test suite, & really principled rollout strategies to catch issues before they get too big.
    - keltex 3y ago
      Perfect example of this is google analytics. The depreciated Universal Analytics on 7/1/2023: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/11583528?hl=en https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/11583528?hl=en But the API to access the replacement GA4 data is still in Beta: (for dotnet / go / python and node):
goeldhru 3y ago
If only someone could actually run and publish comparison benchmarks, but DeWitt clause by Spanner makes it impossible.
- debatem1 3y ago
  Can you go into more detail on this? I assumed almost everyone using systems like this that tout scalability was doing benchmarks.
  - goeldhru 3y ago
    Benchmarks vary quite a bit based on specific workloads. That is why open benchmarking helps where any person can validate the benchmarks. Google enforces De-Witt clause which makes it impossible for a third party to publish such benchmarks. Quite a few cloud providers don't restrict that now.
  - re 3y ago
    Found the term: https://cloud.google.com/terms/service-terms https://cloud.google.com/terms/service-terms > 7. Benchmarking. Customer may conduct benchmark tests of the Services (each a "Test"). Customer may only publicly disclose the results of such Tests if (a) the public disclosure includes all necessary information to replicate the Tests, and (b) Customer allows Google to conduct benchmark tests of Customer's publicly available products or services and publicly disclose the results of such tests. Notwithstanding the foregoing, Customer may not do either of the following on behalf of a hyperscale public cloud provider without Google's prior written consent: (i) conduct (directly or through a third party) any Test or (ii) disclose the results of any such Test. It looks like that is less restrictive than it used to be. I found a blog post from last year mentioning an additional requirement to obtain Google's prior written consent prior to publishing (for all customers, not just fellow cloud providers) which no longer is included. https://cube.dev/blog/dewitt-clause-or-can-you-benchmark-a-database https://cube.dev/blog/dewitt-clause-or-can-you-benchmark-a-d...
- 0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago
  Capitalism at work yet again. Which requires informed consumers. Obvious response is to keep users in the dark.
ris 3y ago
One of the main reasons I'm uneasy about cloud databases is the sheer absurdity of trying to meaningfully compare offerings and their value for money.
FredPret 3y ago
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.
- klodolph 3y ago
  Yeah. I think the whole point of Spanner is to handle larger, larger, larger workloads and databases, and if you can fit everything on a single server, you definitely should. Comparing Postgres to Spanner is kind of like comparing a delivery van to a train. The train is always going to have higher overhead costs. Linux admin is a useful skill, but I know my Linux admin skills can’t compete with the reliability, availability, and scalability of cloud systems… like Dynamo, S3, Spanner, etc.
- 0xbadcafebee 3y ago
  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
  - FredPret 3y ago
    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.
    - 0xbadcafebee 3y ago
      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.
daft_pink 3y ago
Does anyone believe it will stay this way for long?
makestuff 3y ago
I will say pretty crazy spanner is doing 20x the RPS at peak. I thought 126m from dynamoDB was insane, but 2b RPS is just a whole different world
gregdoesit 3y ago
“ According to the Amazon Prime Day blog post, DynamoDB processes 126 million queries per second at peak. Spanner on the other hand processes 3 billion queries per second at peak, which is more than 20x higher, and has more than 12 exabytes of data under management.” This comparison seems to be not exactly fair? Amazon’s 126 million queries per second was purely for Amazon-related services serving Prime Day generating this on DynamoDB, and not all of AWS is my read. What would have perhaps been a more fair comparison is to share the peak load that Google services running Cloud Spanner, and not the sum of all Spanner services across all of GCP and all of Google (Spanner on non-GCP infra). I will say that it would show a massive of confidence to say that Photos, Gmail and Ads heavily rely on GCP infra: which would be brand new information for me! It would add to confidence to learn more on how they use it, and if Cloud Spanner is on the critical path for those services. What is confusing, however, is how in this article "Cloud Spanner" is consistently used... except for when talking about Gmail, Ads and Photos, where it's stated that "Spanner" is used by these products, not "Cloud Spanner!". Like if they were not using the Cloud Spanner infra, but their own. It would help to know what is the case, and what the load of Cloud Spanner is: and not Spanner running on internal Google infra that is not GCP. At Amazon, practically every service is built on top of AWS - a proper vote of confidence! - and my impression was that GCP had historically been far less utilised by Google for their own services. Even in this post, I'm still confused and unable to tell if those Google products listed use Cloud Spanner or their own infra running Spanner.
- forrestbrazeal 3y ago
  We shared some details about Gmail's migration to Spanner in this year's developer keynote at Google Cloud Next [0] - to my knowledge, the first time that story has been publicly talked about. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=268jdNwH6AM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=268jdNwH6AM
  - gregdoesit 3y ago
    I tried to find it in this video, but failed. Could you please share a time stamp on where to look? It’s a pretty big deal if Gmail migrated to GCP-provided Spanner(not to an internal Spanner instance) and sounds like he kind of vote of confidence GCP and Cloud Spanner could benefit from: might I suggest to write about it? It’s easier to digest and harder to miss than an hour-long keynote video with no time stamps. And so just to confirm: Gmail is on Cloud Spanner for the backend?
szesiongteo 3y ago
Well, the thing with Google is whenever their service does not get enough users to reach their target revenue then they can suddenly shutdown in the following year. This is the reason why I would always go with AWS or Azure and GCP the last choice.
frankfrank13 3y ago
one of the best parts of DynamoDB are all of the patterns others have figured out (e.g https://www.dynamodbbook.com/ https://www.dynamodbbook.com/), I'm not aware of the equivalent for GCP Spanner (besides an O'Reilly book I've never read)
supportengineer 3y ago
How’s the customer service experience?
- genmud 3y ago
  That's a trick question, since there isn't any customer service.
ChicagoDave 3y ago
These are not the same data store solutions. Document stores like DynamoDB have a specific operational Write Model purpose whereas an RDBMS is better suited to analytics and reporting.
dchest 3y ago
"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?
- layer8 3y ago
  Money.
- kccqzy 3y ago
  The new leadership under Cloud that chases buzzwords.
- holografix 3y ago
  By hiring VMWare, Dell and Oracle people
- who-le-o 3y ago
  Chances are you're not the audience and some exec is
- Havoc 3y ago
  All corporate-y? By becoming a big corporation
- jdmg94 3y ago
  They removed that line about not being evil
  - michellegienow 3y ago
    ^^^ this
- oars 3y ago
  Google Cloud's current CEO spent 22 years at Oracle before taking this role.
- hot_gril 3y ago
  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.
bambax 3y ago
DynamoDB is such a good name though; "Cloud Spanner" doesn't tell me anything about what this does...
naet 3y ago
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 Google podcast app, but just heard that too is being discontinued and moved to Youtube Music, which is a service I tried and really disliked, so now I need to find a replacement for that too. I didn't personally use some other services, but I know there have been many others ended (such as Stadia for gaming, which made a lot of press at the time). Those are more minor services in the long run, but it makes me a little nervous to go in again on Google for a critical service. Before I invest my time and effort into using it I have to ask myself "Will Google someday sell off or end the cloud spanner service? Will I be in trouble if they do so?".
- btown 3y ago
  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 shutting down Google Cloud services yet, but it's certainly a yellow flag at least.
  - lijok 3y ago
    Oh you are in for a surprise https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprecation-policy-is-killing-you-ee7525dc05dc https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprec...
- victor106 3y ago
  > But I've also been feeling burned a bit by Google suddenly ending services. The products/services that “Google” the search company launches are different than “Google Cloud”. While the discontinuation of Google products is annoying it has nothing to do with Google Cloud products/services. I don’t think Google Cloud abruptly announces discontinuing products/services as they have paid customers. Regarding Google Domains that is a Google product. The equivalent product from Google is “Google Cloud Domains” which is available to Google Cloud customers.
BizarreByte 3y ago
At the end of the day this comes down to more than cost. I trust AWS to be a stable, long term foundation to build a product on, I don't trust GCP to be the same.
- catch22l 3y ago
  why ?
cloudyq 3y ago
[dead]
cdelsolar 3y ago
There is no problem PostgreSQL can't solve unless the problem involves massively distributed global databases that need to be incredibly fast and in sync with each other, and even then I think Slony can help.
cloudyq 3y ago
[dead]
deleted 3y ago
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hintymad 3y ago
Does Google Cloud Spanner use the Spanner database per the 2013 paper? Or does Google simply use the brand and implement a cheaper and more performant db under the hood? I suspect it is the latter because most companies do not need global consistency anyway, so it may make sense to relax parts of what Spanner was originally built for.
- smueller1234 3y ago
  Yes, it's the same Spanner that's used internally. But obviously it's progressed hugely since 2013.
  - GabeWeiss_ 3y ago
    More specifically, infra and cloud Spanner are the same stack. So they've progressed together hugely since 2013. :) The real differences between the two are more about the internal tooling we (Google) have around infra that's built up with our other services that consume it over the years that aren't relevant to anyone other than Google.
  - hintymad 3y ago
    Amazing. And thanks for clarification
vicpara 3y ago
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 tinkering around our infra and it never ends. It's 50:50. 50% of time making sure we are prepared for their shit and 50 % our ambitious infra plans. Good luck with that. With AWS our bill is 60% of what GCP used to be running 3 k8s clusters. AWS support is so nice, you can't believe it. Nah, I don't trust Google with anything. It's a scam. Google's support is horrendous. They refer you to idiots that drag you through calls until your will for life dies. And you're back to the mercy of some lost engineer that may comment on a github issue you opened 20 days ago. We have a bug reported back in 2020 that got closed recently without any action because it became stale and the API changed so much it doesn't really matter. It's that bad. The billing day is a monthly reminder you're paying entitled devs to do subpar work other companies do a lot better. No, we don't miss them already.
- g9yuayon 3y ago
  > AWS support is so nice, you can't believe it. This reminds me of the fond days of having weekly customers calls. We develop AWS services, and we answer our customer-support calls directly. No middle man. Just techies to techies. And we made promises to customers on the fly, and customers sometimes project managed us.
  - kubb 3y ago
    Sounds like hell...
    - oblio 3y ago
      The last part is a over the top but direct access to customers as a dev is a plus, not a minus.
    - User23 3y ago
CodeWriter23 3y ago
Meh. Why am I going to sign up for a service that is surely to be canceled on a Google Whim™?
- chickenpotpie 3y ago
  Spanner is probably the least likely thing to ever get cancelled at google by a long shot. It powers basically every single product at google and has been around for many years. I can't think of another Google product that has been around for so long and used internally and externally so heavily besides Gmail (which uses spanner).
  - CodeWriter23 3y ago
    It will be deprecated some day.
RainbowFriends 3y ago
I have a personal GCP account with an average spend of $12/month over the last year or so. The past week, I've been bombarded with messages and phone calls from a GCP saleswoman trying to get me to spend more. These business practices reek of desperation.
RandyRanderson 3y ago
Translation: The market has determined that Google Cloud Spanner is worth half of Amazon DynamoDB.
topicseed 3y ago
Pricing per operation would make this an no-brainer for cases where DynamoDB and Spanner are considered good options.
dangoodmanUT 3y ago
But you have to start by paying like $1k/mo, it's not serverless (at least the last time I checked). Get CRDB instead.
dangoodmanUT 3y ago
Shame I don't trust GCP anymore
awnion 3y ago
Half an infinity is still an infinity

thedougd 3y ago

I look forward to the AWS pricing reduction.

mmanfrin 3y ago

Google also has a history of massively spiking the cost of its services. Vendor lockin is a dangerous thing.

xnx 3y ago
This definitely happened with Google Maps, where Google was clearly the dominant player. Has it happened to other services? It seems far less likely to happen for business cloud services where they are a distance 2nd (3rd?) to AWS. I know of some examples (admittedly ancient) where they have reduced costs: https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2015/05/Pay-Less-Compute-Moore.html https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2015/05/Pay-Less-Comput...
- callalex 3y ago
  Before they offered Google cloud, they offered Google App Engine. After they introduced Google Cloud they got bored of App Engine and 10x’d the price. This was particularly painful because App Engine was a batteries-included solution with heavy vendor lock-in.
  - xnx 3y ago
    Good history lesson. I didn't realize that Google Cloud wasn't a rename/expansion of Google App Engine.
    - dragonwriter 3y ago
      But, Google Cloud was a rename/expansion (specifically, expansion) of Google App Engine (GAE a pre-existing Google products that was then part of Google Cloud when the latter brand was launched.)
  - derefr 3y ago
    > After they introduced Google Cloud they got bored of App Engine and 10x’d the price. I don't know about "got bored of"; I'd say more "effectively deprecated, using increasing costs† as an implicit push toward rewriting your service for more modern parts of their platform." Specifically, Google want you to rewrite your GAE apps for Cloud Run (https://cloud.google.com/appengine/migration-center/run/compare-gae-with-run https://cloud.google.com/appengine/migration-center/run/comp...): > Cloud Run is the latest evolution of Google Cloud Serverless, building on the experience of running App Engine for more than a decade. Cloud Run runs on much of the same infrastructure as App Engine standard environment, so there are many similarities between these two platforms. > Cloud Run is designed to improve upon the App Engine experience, incorporating many of the best features of both App Engine standard environment and App Engine flexible environment. Cloud Run services can handle the same workloads as App Engine services, but Cloud Run offers customers much more flexibility in implementing these services. This flexibility, along with improved integrations with both Google Cloud and third-party services, also enables Cloud Run to handle workloads that cannot run on App Engine. Anyone who's still on GAE (rather than having moved over to Cloud Run) at this point is a "legacy enterprise customer"; and so Google have at this point moved GAE pricing beyond just a monetary disincentive to use, to being "fired-customer pricing" — i.e. the price you charge when you don't really want to work with a customer any more, a price that says "go away", but if they still want to pay you even at that price-point, then sure, why not?
- acdha 3y ago
  The last year has had multiple GCP cost increases: https://cloud.google.com/storage/pricing-announce https://cloud.google.com/storage/pricing-announce https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/updates-to-google-clouds-infrastructure-pricing https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/update... https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/data-analytics/introducing-new-bigquery-pricing-editions https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/data-analytics/introd... https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing-announce https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing-announce https://cloud.google.com/vpc/pricing-announce https://cloud.google.com/vpc/pricing-announce
- logicchains 3y ago
  >Has it happened to other services? BigQuery initially was a lot more powerful, then they started adding a bunch of resource limits on queries that you could only overcome by paying up. Not a direct fee increase, rather you paid the same fee for a worse product.
Tehnix 3y ago
Curious: have they ever increased prices of existing Google Cloud services? As far as I know, AWS only ever decreases prices on services for example
- jefftk 3y ago
  AWS has increased prices, most recently when they started charging for static IPs (even ones attached to a running instance).
  - tpmx 3y ago
    That one caused a week of work for me... (redesigning something slated to go live in a few months)
- tpmx 3y ago
  GCP has seen price increases: https://techcrunch.com/2022/03/14/inflation-is-real-google-cloud-raises-its-storage-prices/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/03/14/inflation-is-real-google-c... Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30671997 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30671997
- rlpb 3y ago
  "Coders howl over Google's App Engine price hike (natch)" https://www.theregister.com/2011/09/02/google_app_engine_users_on_pricing_change/ https://www.theregister.com/2011/09/02/google_app_engine_use... I don't know if Google App Engine falls under Google Cloud services, but either way that's just a technicality; the sentiment remains the same. Edit: more information here: https://github.com/stickfigure/blog/wiki/The-Unofficial-Google-App-Engine-Price-Change-FAQ https://github.com/stickfigure/blog/wiki/The-Unofficial-Goog...
  - packetslave 3y ago
    TWELVE YEARS AGO! find a new complaint.
    - 3y ago
Freedom2 3y ago
Is there any evidence of vendor lock-in actually being a widespread issue?
holografix 3y ago
Source?

andrewedstrom 3y ago

Not pictured: the cost of switching to DynamoDB when this service inevitably gets shut down in two years.

vlovich123 3y ago
There’s no way spanner gets shut down. It’s critical to so much of Google’s internal infra.
- johncessna 3y ago
  That doesn't address GCP itself getting shut down in 2 years.
  - art-not 3y ago
    Is there a reason to believe this will happen?
  - goldfish3 3y ago
    Lol. The people you find on Hacker News sometimes...
  - vlovich123 3y ago
    I really doubt that. They’re starting to finally turn a profit ($200 million) and it’s a 8 billion in revenue a quarter line of business. Google shuts down businesses that aren’t as revenue generating but 8 billion a quarter (32B annually) is a massive business and the “losses” are likely mostly from R&D reinvestments to keep growing that line of business.
  - mattzito 3y ago
    GCP is profitable and growing 27% YoY. It made more money than YouTube ads did in Q2 2023. In what world would it make sense to shut down GCP at this point? I think the "google shuts things down" trope is justified and something that I wince at every time I see something like this, but GCP isn't a random pet project that loses money and has no users. It's a very successful enterprise business. (disclaimer: I work at google in cloud, so obviously I have personal bias, but this is just my opinion based on the pure numbers.)

grogenaut 3y ago

if they're cutting the price they are likely worried about the product... are they going to cancel it like every other product they've released?

nickstinemates 3y ago
They didn't cut the price. They increased performance and are claiming half price to a similar workload on Amazon. Titles a little disingenuous.

spullara 3y ago

Without an on-demand version of spanner that doesn't charge per node but per operation makes it not comparable to dynamodb for many use cases.

joshuanapoli 3y ago
Exactly: I have to provision for peak throughput on Spanner. Average throughput is much lower than the peak throughput, so I'm doubtful of seeing savings no Spanner. (But I bet that Spanner is much easier than DynamoDB to develop with...)
- rkeene2 3y ago
  You can scale Spanner up/down based on demand although there is a lag time with it. I built a system that relies on a high-performance database and tested with both AWS DynamoDB and Google Cloud Spanner (see disclaimer) and was able to scale Google Cloud Spanner much higher than AWS DynamoDB. DynamoDB is limited to 1000 WRUs per node, and there isn't an obvious way to get more than 100 nodes per table, so you're limited to 100,000 WRUs per table (= 102400000 bytes/sec = 97 MiB/sec = 776 Mib/sec) -- even if you reserve more than 100,000 WRUs in capacity for the table. The obvious workaround would be to shard the data across multiple tables, but that would have made the software more difficult to use. Google Cloud Spanner was able to do much more than 97 MiB/sec in traffic (though the exact amount isn't yet public), and also was capable of much larger transactions (100 MiB versus DynamoDB's 25 (now it is 100) items * 400KiB of ~10 MiB) which was a bonus. Disclaimer: The work was funded by a former Google CEO and I worked with the Google Spanner team on setting it up, while I am a former AWS employee I didn't work with AWS on the DynamoDB part of it, though I did normal quota adjustments.
  - ripper1138 3y ago
    Doesn’t seem like a fair comparison.
  - arpinum 3y ago
    > and there isn't an obvious way to get more than 100 nodes per table By node you mean partition, and a partition is limited to 10GB. Store more than 1TB and you will have at least 100 partitions

benmanns 3y ago

I wish I could play around with Spanner for personal/side projects, but a production ready instance starts at $65/mo. DynamoDB can run for ~$0.00/month with per-request pricing.

meowtimemania 3y ago
This is the main reason I like DynamoDB. I can run side projects indefinitely for basically $0/month.
- iends 3y ago
  Same as with lambda. I have a side project that costs $0.42/mo to run.
GabeWeiss_ 3y ago
You can! Spanner has a free trial: https://cloud.google.com/spanner/docs/free-trial-instance https://cloud.google.com/spanner/docs/free-trial-instance. Keep in mind, that per-request pricing isn't free unless you stay under the free tier. So just take a look at what those limits are because going above them means you're not free anymore.
michellegienow 3y ago
if you are interested in spanner, you might take a look at cockroachdb. esp the production ready serverless offering which is pay for consumption only. crdb architecture is essentially spanner under the bonnet, GIFFE https://www.cockroachlabs.com/get-started-cockroachdb/ https://www.cockroachlabs.com/get-started-cockroachdb/

brianolson 3y ago

"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/ https://aws.amazon.com/dynamodb/pricing/ So, there's probably somewhere the lines on the graph cross, but Google's headline seems misleading.

hdjjhhvvhga 3y ago
The Free Tier is completely irrelevant here, though. The very reason someone might use Spanner is its excellent scalability. I don't believe there is any reason to use it for smaller projects other than education. The customers who will use Spanners are those for whom CockroachDB is not enough, for example. For everybody with databases that are not that huge PostgreSQL will do just fine.
- Vt71fcAqt7 3y ago
  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 people who would want to use this with a free tier for hobby projects. ie. in between education and production development.
  - dmoy 3y ago
    > 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, lots of handwaving happening here)
    - 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

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TheTaO 3y ago

That headline is half truth. Price of a cloud database depends on so many things. what is the I/O, what is the storage utilization, cross-region traffic, etc. Picking one scenario and claiming the cost to be half is too simplistic and a marketing gimmick.

idunno246 3y ago
Also which dynamo price are they comparing to? On demand? Provisioned? Reserved provisioned? We had a huge spanner db with low throughput so had to add idle nodes just for storage which also ballooned costs for spanner(the increased storage size here helps)

TedDoesntTalk 3y ago

…until it’s canceled

nameless912 3y ago

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. Just...use Postgres.

teaearlgraycold 3y ago
Postgres is the database God himself would have made.
- nameless912 3y ago
  Like, I don't want to fanboy, but it's _hard_ to find a use case that postgres can't handle at small to medium (i.e. 90% of projects) scale.
  - 0xbadcafebee 3y ago
    It's hard to find a use case that a plain old filesystem can't handle at small to medium scale. But there are perhaps more important considerations than just "can it handle it"
    - diordiderot 3y ago
      Like what? (Genuinely curious)
  - pier25 3y ago
    Probably more like 99%
  - nvm0n2 3y ago
    Uh let's not get carried away. It's fine with enough work maybe. But Postgres has a lot of awkwardness too. HA is a pain, major version upgrades are a pain, JS or JVM stored procs are a pain, configuring auth is a pain. There is a reason so many people are desperate to pay someone else to run Postgres for them instead of just renting a few VMs and doing it themselves.

brianolson 3y ago

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

bananapub 3y ago
that really should be the first heuristic for almost any systems design problem - if you can afford to buy a big enough pair of machines to fit your data in hot-swap postgres then just do that. don't bother with mongo or mysql or dynamo or cassandra or bigtable or spanner or ... until your lack of profitability or size means you can't afford to just use postgres.
- meowtimemania 3y ago
  What do you mean "can't afford to just use postgres"? I thought postgres cost per query in many cases is cheaper than competitors.
  - bananapub 3y ago
    > What do you mean "can't afford to just use postgres"? if I have 10TB of hot data, can I afford two machines with 10T of RAM each? how about 100T? > I thought postgres cost per query in many cases is cheaper than competitors. that's not really a useful metric without size/latency/etc attached to it, being cheap for 0.1qps might be fine for a YC company but that's no good for my successful company etc
    - meowtimemania 3y ago
      Makes sense. Thanks for the response!
hot_gril 3y ago
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.

aa_is_op 3y ago

But twice as complex to use, though. That GCP interface is cancer. You need a Google-to-English dictionary to understand it.

icedchai 3y ago
AWS is really no better. Both consoles are a mess in their own ways. CLIs are really what matters, though. In general, I have found the GCP command line (“gcloud”) easier to work with.
GabeWeiss_ 3y ago
Tell me more (bonus points if you find me on LinkedIn or other social because tracking comment responses on HN is really rough). I'd love feedback you have so I can bring it back to the product team!

dastbe 3y ago

where’s the worked examples, forrestbrazeal

baridbelmedar 3y ago

I'm really excited about this as a customer. We're probably going to be able to save a lot of money because of it. So now, with the new Postgres compatibility layer and the "lower cost", it will be easier for me to choose Spanner when we start new projects.

GabeWeiss_ 3y ago
Really glad to hear! Please find me on social media or LinkedIn and let me know how it goes for you using the PG layer. I'd love to hear more feedback.

guluarte 3y ago

99% of the projects dont need dynamodb/spanner/ScyllaDB

theshrike79 3y ago
DynamoDB has a free tier. I've been running a semi-active app wholly on the free tier for a good 3-4 years now. Lambda is free too. I think the only thing I pay for is API Gateway, and that's around $2 a month max.
- meowtimemania 3y ago
  Have you considered doing CloudFront --> Lambda Function URL? Would that lower your costs?
PeterCorless 3y ago
DynamoDB and ScyllaDB are very different use cases than Spanner. • Spanner is more in the domain of CockroachDB — distributed strong consistency and ACID compliance. Both are ANSI SQL. • DynamoDB and ScyllaDB are in the NoSQL key-value store / wide column domain. ScyllaDB is API compatible with DynamoDB, but is also API compatible with Cassandra Query Language (CQL). These databases are for eventual consistency use cases. As to the "99%" comment, there are over 415 databases currently tracked on DB-engines.com (https://db-engines.com/en/ranking https://db-engines.com/en/ranking). It is a very competitive and specialized industry. Very few databases have more than 1% marketshare these days. According to this: https://6sense.com/tech/relational-databases https://6sense.com/tech/relational-databases ...only the top 9 options show >1% of marketshare. MySQL being so far in the lead (42%) is far more likely due to it being baked into so many OEM deals (over 2,000 as per https://www.mysql.com/oem/ https://www.mysql.com/oem/). Like, every WordPress site in the world than anything else. Yet that doesn't really make MySQL great for every use cases. It has obvious limitations. We also have to note that different studies have far different results. In this video: https://statisticsanddata.org/data/the-most-popular-databases-2006-2023/ https://statisticsanddata.org/data/the-most-popular-database... It shows a different set of top databases, and has 11 of them showing >2% of marketshare. It has MySQL at only 13.91% of marketshare, with Oracle being on top at 31.19%. The source of this poll is TOPDB Top Database index: https://pypl.github.io/DB.html https://pypl.github.io/DB.html It's not based on money marketshare, nor on poll results, but simply is counting how often a database is searched on Google. Note that anything that could garner 1% of the market would suddenly catapult that database into the top 16th place on the list. At the end of the day, database "market share" — however it is calculated — is not representative of exclusive percentages. Many companies run more than 1 type of database. There might even be multiple SQL and NoSQL databases, each designed for purpose, at large enterprises. OLTP, OLAP. I would not be surprisedi in the least to learn that large corporations had well over 100 different databases running at any given time. So, back to your basic comment: if a database is useful for even 1% of the use cases, that would still place it in the top 20 databases in the industry. Moreover, a lowest-common denominator database will not be able to support many critical use cases where you really do need a specialized data model, or index type, or query language, or workload type, or latency, or distribution, or scale of QPS/TPS/OPS, or total data size or query payload size, etc. I have likened the database industry to the state of Christianity after the Reformation. Even if there are still plenty of "Catholics" (classic SQL adherent, like Oracle), there are also Reformed faiths ("NewSQL" / "Distributed SQL", e.g., PostgreSQL), plus any number of Protestant reformation alternatives (NoSQL). I'm not sure what the "Orthodox" in this analogy refers to. Maybe SQL data warehouses? The schism between OLTP and OLAP? Dunno. Anyway, it's an analogy. Bound to break down at some point. At the end of the day, my advice: use the database most closely aligned to the dataset and workload and use case you have at hand. Don't just throw something at a problem because it's a popular choice, or because it's the database you happen to be most familiar with.

JohnMakin 3y ago

Cool, too bad I can't rely on Google suddenly deprecating this service.

remus 3y ago
An internal version has been used within Google since ~2012 and the GCP version has been available since 2017. It's used extensively within Google. It's not going to be deprecated any time soon.
- jiggawatts 3y ago
  Narrator: it was turned off in 2025.

revel 3y ago

This thread is already a damning indictment of google cloud. Price cuts alone won't attract customers -- google has sustained significant reputational damage with their crappy customer service and support. That's hard to fix

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
clumsysmurf 3y ago
I've been doing Android development since 1.0, many Android developers are unhappy with the abusive "relationship" they have with Google, because of their control over the Play Store, your developer account, and resolving things if they come up. I'd pick any non-Google tech if there was an alternative.
- airstrike 3y ago
  Are iOS developers happy with Apple's control over the App Store, their developer account, and resolving things if they come up?
kubb 3y ago
Yes, but also every 3 out of 4 people here have applied to work for Google, and most got rejected, so that can contribute to the negative sentiment. Spanner is a pretty solid database, it checks all the boxes: consistency, geographic replication and transactional updates are not present at the same time in most large scale db's out there.

joshe 3y ago

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 margin they want and let the market sort out what gets used. Google is into secretive grand strategy that changes completely anytime 4 product managers get together in a room.

heliodor 3y ago
This! Google has shown many times they can't be trusted.
- catch22l 3y ago
  such a biased comment. do you think AWS is sitting on 2012 prices ?
emodendroket 3y ago
Yegge had an article saying that Google had really good tools to clean up uses of deprecated calls and the like and this had made them way too cavalier about breaking changes. Can't vouch for it but an interesting dynamic.
- vlovich123 3y ago
  I mean, a common joke among ICs at Google is that the API or service you're calling is deprecated but the replacement system isn't ready yet. They have good tools, but the cavalierness about breaking changes would be more because teams can just say "not supported" anymore for internal APIs and services, a more thorough test suite, & really principled rollout strategies to catch issues before they get too big.
  - keltex 3y ago
    Perfect example of this is google analytics. The depreciated Universal Analytics on 7/1/2023: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/11583528?hl=en https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/11583528?hl=en But the API to access the replacement GA4 data is still in Beta: (for dotnet / go / python and node):

goeldhru 3y ago

If only someone could actually run and publish comparison benchmarks, but DeWitt clause by Spanner makes it impossible.

debatem1 3y ago
Can you go into more detail on this? I assumed almost everyone using systems like this that tout scalability was doing benchmarks.
- goeldhru 3y ago
  Benchmarks vary quite a bit based on specific workloads. That is why open benchmarking helps where any person can validate the benchmarks. Google enforces De-Witt clause which makes it impossible for a third party to publish such benchmarks. Quite a few cloud providers don't restrict that now.
- re 3y ago
  Found the term: https://cloud.google.com/terms/service-terms https://cloud.google.com/terms/service-terms > 7. Benchmarking. Customer may conduct benchmark tests of the Services (each a "Test"). Customer may only publicly disclose the results of such Tests if (a) the public disclosure includes all necessary information to replicate the Tests, and (b) Customer allows Google to conduct benchmark tests of Customer's publicly available products or services and publicly disclose the results of such tests. Notwithstanding the foregoing, Customer may not do either of the following on behalf of a hyperscale public cloud provider without Google's prior written consent: (i) conduct (directly or through a third party) any Test or (ii) disclose the results of any such Test. It looks like that is less restrictive than it used to be. I found a blog post from last year mentioning an additional requirement to obtain Google's prior written consent prior to publishing (for all customers, not just fellow cloud providers) which no longer is included. https://cube.dev/blog/dewitt-clause-or-can-you-benchmark-a-database https://cube.dev/blog/dewitt-clause-or-can-you-benchmark-a-d...
0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago
Capitalism at work yet again. Which requires informed consumers. Obvious response is to keep users in the dark.

ris 3y ago

One of the main reasons I'm uneasy about cloud databases is the sheer absurdity of trying to meaningfully compare offerings and their value for money.

FredPret 3y ago

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.

klodolph 3y ago
Yeah. I think the whole point of Spanner is to handle larger, larger, larger workloads and databases, and if you can fit everything on a single server, you definitely should. Comparing Postgres to Spanner is kind of like comparing a delivery van to a train. The train is always going to have higher overhead costs. Linux admin is a useful skill, but I know my Linux admin skills can’t compete with the reliability, availability, and scalability of cloud systems… like Dynamo, S3, Spanner, etc.
0xbadcafebee 3y ago
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
- FredPret 3y ago
  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.
  - 0xbadcafebee 3y ago
    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.

daft_pink 3y ago

Does anyone believe it will stay this way for long?

makestuff 3y ago

I will say pretty crazy spanner is doing 20x the RPS at peak. I thought 126m from dynamoDB was insane, but 2b RPS is just a whole different world

gregdoesit 3y ago

“ According to the Amazon Prime Day blog post, DynamoDB processes 126 million queries per second at peak. Spanner on the other hand processes 3 billion queries per second at peak, which is more than 20x higher, and has more than 12 exabytes of data under management.” This comparison seems to be not exactly fair? Amazon’s 126 million queries per second was purely for Amazon-related services serving Prime Day generating this on DynamoDB, and not all of AWS is my read. What would have perhaps been a more fair comparison is to share the peak load that Google services running Cloud Spanner, and not the sum of all Spanner services across all of GCP and all of Google (Spanner on non-GCP infra). I will say that it would show a massive of confidence to say that Photos, Gmail and Ads heavily rely on GCP infra: which would be brand new information for me! It would add to confidence to learn more on how they use it, and if Cloud Spanner is on the critical path for those services. What is confusing, however, is how in this article "Cloud Spanner" is consistently used... except for when talking about Gmail, Ads and Photos, where it's stated that "Spanner" is used by these products, not "Cloud Spanner!". Like if they were not using the Cloud Spanner infra, but their own. It would help to know what is the case, and what the load of Cloud Spanner is: and not Spanner running on internal Google infra that is not GCP. At Amazon, practically every service is built on top of AWS - a proper vote of confidence! - and my impression was that GCP had historically been far less utilised by Google for their own services. Even in this post, I'm still confused and unable to tell if those Google products listed use Cloud Spanner or their own infra running Spanner.

forrestbrazeal 3y ago
We shared some details about Gmail's migration to Spanner in this year's developer keynote at Google Cloud Next [0] - to my knowledge, the first time that story has been publicly talked about. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=268jdNwH6AM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=268jdNwH6AM
- gregdoesit 3y ago
  I tried to find it in this video, but failed. Could you please share a time stamp on where to look? It’s a pretty big deal if Gmail migrated to GCP-provided Spanner(not to an internal Spanner instance) and sounds like he kind of vote of confidence GCP and Cloud Spanner could benefit from: might I suggest to write about it? It’s easier to digest and harder to miss than an hour-long keynote video with no time stamps. And so just to confirm: Gmail is on Cloud Spanner for the backend?

szesiongteo 3y ago

Well, the thing with Google is whenever their service does not get enough users to reach their target revenue then they can suddenly shutdown in the following year. This is the reason why I would always go with AWS or Azure and GCP the last choice.

frankfrank13 3y ago

one of the best parts of DynamoDB are all of the patterns others have figured out (e.g https://www.dynamodbbook.com/ https://www.dynamodbbook.com/), I'm not aware of the equivalent for GCP Spanner (besides an O'Reilly book I've never read)

supportengineer 3y ago

How’s the customer service experience?

genmud 3y ago
That's a trick question, since there isn't any customer service.

ChicagoDave 3y ago

These are not the same data store solutions. Document stores like DynamoDB have a specific operational Write Model purpose whereas an RDBMS is better suited to analytics and reporting.

dchest 3y ago

"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?

layer8 3y ago
Money.
kccqzy 3y ago
The new leadership under Cloud that chases buzzwords.
holografix 3y ago
By hiring VMWare, Dell and Oracle people
who-le-o 3y ago
Chances are you're not the audience and some exec is
Havoc 3y ago
All corporate-y? By becoming a big corporation
jdmg94 3y ago
They removed that line about not being evil
- michellegienow 3y ago
  ^^^ this
oars 3y ago
Google Cloud's current CEO spent 22 years at Oracle before taking this role.
hot_gril 3y ago
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.

bambax 3y ago

DynamoDB is such a good name though; "Cloud Spanner" doesn't tell me anything about what this does...

naet 3y ago

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 Google podcast app, but just heard that too is being discontinued and moved to Youtube Music, which is a service I tried and really disliked, so now I need to find a replacement for that too. I didn't personally use some other services, but I know there have been many others ended (such as Stadia for gaming, which made a lot of press at the time). Those are more minor services in the long run, but it makes me a little nervous to go in again on Google for a critical service. Before I invest my time and effort into using it I have to ask myself "Will Google someday sell off or end the cloud spanner service? Will I be in trouble if they do so?".

btown 3y ago
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 shutting down Google Cloud services yet, but it's certainly a yellow flag at least.
- lijok 3y ago
  Oh you are in for a surprise https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprecation-policy-is-killing-you-ee7525dc05dc https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprec...
victor106 3y ago
> But I've also been feeling burned a bit by Google suddenly ending services. The products/services that “Google” the search company launches are different than “Google Cloud”. While the discontinuation of Google products is annoying it has nothing to do with Google Cloud products/services. I don’t think Google Cloud abruptly announces discontinuing products/services as they have paid customers. Regarding Google Domains that is a Google product. The equivalent product from Google is “Google Cloud Domains” which is available to Google Cloud customers.

BizarreByte 3y ago

At the end of the day this comes down to more than cost. I trust AWS to be a stable, long term foundation to build a product on, I don't trust GCP to be the same.

catch22l 3y ago
why ?

cloudyq 3y ago

[dead]

cdelsolar 3y ago

There is no problem PostgreSQL can't solve unless the problem involves massively distributed global databases that need to be incredibly fast and in sync with each other, and even then I think Slony can help.

cloudyq 3y ago

[dead]

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

hintymad 3y ago

Does Google Cloud Spanner use the Spanner database per the 2013 paper? Or does Google simply use the brand and implement a cheaper and more performant db under the hood? I suspect it is the latter because most companies do not need global consistency anyway, so it may make sense to relax parts of what Spanner was originally built for.

smueller1234 3y ago
Yes, it's the same Spanner that's used internally. But obviously it's progressed hugely since 2013.
- GabeWeiss_ 3y ago
  More specifically, infra and cloud Spanner are the same stack. So they've progressed together hugely since 2013. :) The real differences between the two are more about the internal tooling we (Google) have around infra that's built up with our other services that consume it over the years that aren't relevant to anyone other than Google.
- hintymad 3y ago
  Amazing. And thanks for clarification

vicpara 3y ago

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 tinkering around our infra and it never ends. It's 50:50. 50% of time making sure we are prepared for their shit and 50 % our ambitious infra plans. Good luck with that. With AWS our bill is 60% of what GCP used to be running 3 k8s clusters. AWS support is so nice, you can't believe it. Nah, I don't trust Google with anything. It's a scam. Google's support is horrendous. They refer you to idiots that drag you through calls until your will for life dies. And you're back to the mercy of some lost engineer that may comment on a github issue you opened 20 days ago. We have a bug reported back in 2020 that got closed recently without any action because it became stale and the API changed so much it doesn't really matter. It's that bad. The billing day is a monthly reminder you're paying entitled devs to do subpar work other companies do a lot better. No, we don't miss them already.

g9yuayon 3y ago
> AWS support is so nice, you can't believe it. This reminds me of the fond days of having weekly customers calls. We develop AWS services, and we answer our customer-support calls directly. No middle man. Just techies to techies. And we made promises to customers on the fly, and customers sometimes project managed us.
- kubb 3y ago
  Sounds like hell...
  - oblio 3y ago
    The last part is a over the top but direct access to customers as a dev is a plus, not a minus.
  - User23 3y ago

CodeWriter23 3y ago

Meh. Why am I going to sign up for a service that is surely to be canceled on a Google Whim™?

chickenpotpie 3y ago
Spanner is probably the least likely thing to ever get cancelled at google by a long shot. It powers basically every single product at google and has been around for many years. I can't think of another Google product that has been around for so long and used internally and externally so heavily besides Gmail (which uses spanner).
- CodeWriter23 3y ago
  It will be deprecated some day.

RainbowFriends 3y ago

I have a personal GCP account with an average spend of $12/month over the last year or so. The past week, I've been bombarded with messages and phone calls from a GCP saleswoman trying to get me to spend more. These business practices reek of desperation.

RandyRanderson 3y ago

Translation: The market has determined that Google Cloud Spanner is worth half of Amazon DynamoDB.

topicseed 3y ago

Pricing per operation would make this an no-brainer for cases where DynamoDB and Spanner are considered good options.

dangoodmanUT 3y ago

But you have to start by paying like $1k/mo, it's not serverless (at least the last time I checked). Get CRDB instead.

dangoodmanUT 3y ago

Shame I don't trust GCP anymore

awnion 3y ago

Half an infinity is still an infinity