Google Cloud Spanner is now half the cost of Amazon DynamoDB

Just moved our infra from GCP to AWS. Kubernetes clusters, LB, storage, lambdas, KMS and all of it.<p>Google runs their tech stack as if it&#x27;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&#x27;s 50:50. 50% of time making sure we are prepared for their shit and 50 % our ambitious infra plans. Good luck with that.<p>With AWS our bill is 60% of what GCP used to be running 3 k8s clusters.<p>AWS support is so nice, you can&#x27;t believe it.<p>Nah, I don&#x27;t trust Google with anything. It&#x27;s a scam. Google&#x27;s support is horrendous. They refer you to idiots that drag you through calls until your will for life dies. And you&#x27;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&#x27;t really matter. It&#x27;s that bad.<p>The billing day is a monthly reminder you&#x27;re paying entitled devs to do subpar work other companies do a lot better.<p>No, we don&#x27;t miss them already.

“ 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.”<p>This comparison seems to be not exactly fair? Amazon’s 126 million queries per second was <i>purely</i> for Amazon-related services serving Prime Day generating this on DynamoDB, and not all of AWS is my read.<p>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).<p>I will say that it would show a <i>massive</i> 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.<p>What is confusing, however, is how in this article &quot;Cloud Spanner&quot; is consistently used... except for when talking about Gmail, Ads and Photos, where it&#x27;s stated that &quot;Spanner&quot; is used by these products, not &quot;Cloud Spanner!&quot;. 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.<p>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&#x27;m still confused and unable to tell if those Google products listed use <i>Cloud Spanner</i> or their own infra running Spanner.

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&#x2F;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.<p>AWS and GCP (and Azure, and Oracle cloud, and bare Kubernetes via an operator, and...) support Postgres really well. Just...use Postgres.

&quot;as little as $65 USD&#x2F;month&quot; for GCP Spanner<p>vs AWS Free Tier:<p>&quot;25 GB of data storage ... 2.5 million stream read requests ...&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aws.amazon.com&#x2F;dynamodb&#x2F;pricing&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aws.amazon.com&#x2F;dynamodb&#x2F;pricing&#x2F;</a><p>So, there&#x27;s probably somewhere the lines on the graph cross, but Google&#x27;s headline seems misleading.

I wish I could play around with Spanner for personal&#x2F;side projects, but a production ready instance starts at $65&#x2F;mo. DynamoDB can run for ~$0.00&#x2F;month with per-request pricing.

I&#x27;m torn because I have really liked Google offerings in the past (I&#x27;m pretty locked in on gmail, I have different things running on GCP already, etc). But I&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;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).<p>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 &quot;Will Google someday sell off or end the cloud spanner service? Will I be in trouble if they do so?&quot;.

<i>&quot;Organizations of all sizes and across all industries are increasingly looking to accelerate digital transformation and power AI-driven innovation.&quot;</i><p>How did Google become like this?

Without an on-demand version of spanner that doesn&#x27;t charge per node but per operation makes it not comparable to dynamodb for many use cases.

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

But a droplet with a Postgres db is nearly free, and seriously performant.<p>And for 65&#x2F;month, you can get a VERY beefy Hetzner server.<p>You’ll have to wade through the crazy thicket that is the menu of cloud offerings.<p>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.

but as always: Are you sure your data doesn&#x27;t fit in PostgreSQL? You should probably try PostgreSQL first.

one of the best parts of DynamoDB are all of the patterns others have figured out (e.g <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dynamodbbook.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dynamodbbook.com&#x2F;</a>), I&#x27;m not aware of the equivalent for GCP Spanner (besides an O&#x27;Reilly book I&#x27;ve never read)

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

I have a personal GCP account with an average spend of $12&#x2F;month over the last year or so. The past week, I&#x27;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.

That headline is half truth. Price of a cloud database depends on so many things. what is the I&#x2F;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.

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

Cool, too bad I can&#x27;t rely on Google suddenly deprecating this service.

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&#x27;t trust GCP to be the same.

One of the main reasons I&#x27;m uneasy about cloud databases is the sheer absurdity of trying to meaningfully compare offerings and their value for money.

I&#x27;m really excited about this as a customer. We&#x27;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 &quot;lower cost&quot;, it will be easier for me to choose Spanner when we start new projects.

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.

99% of the projects dont need dynamodb&#x2F;spanner&#x2F;ScyllaDB

Does anyone believe it will stay this way for long?

But you have to start by paying like $1k&#x2F;mo, it&#x27;s not serverless (at least the last time I checked). Get CRDB instead.

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

DynamoDB is such a good name though; &quot;Cloud Spanner&quot; doesn&#x27;t tell me anything about what this does...

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

There is no problem PostgreSQL can&#x27;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.

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.

I look forward to the AWS pricing reduction.

Half an infinity is still an infinity

How’s the customer service experience?

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

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

Shame I don&#x27;t trust GCP anymore

where’s the worked examples, forrestbrazeal

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.<p>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 &quot;sorry here&#x27;s a shiv to the gut&quot;.<p>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.

This thread is already a damning indictment of google cloud. Price cuts alone won&#x27;t attract customers -- google has sustained significant reputational damage with their crappy customer service and support. That&#x27;s hard to fix

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

…until it’s canceled

if they&#x27;re cutting the price they are likely worried about the product... are they going to cancel it like every other product they&#x27;ve released?

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.