Biggest Under Reported Story: Google's BigTable Costs 10 Times Less than Amazon's SimpleDB
Why isn't Google's aggressive new database pricing strategy getting more pub? That's what Bill Katz, instigator of the GAE Meetup and prize winning science fiction author is wondering:
It's surprising that the blogosphere hasn't picked up the biggest difference in pricing:
Google's datastore is less than a tenth of the price of Amazon's SimpleDB while offering a better API.
If money matters to you then the burn rate under GAE could be convincingly lower. Let's compare the numbers:
GAE pricing:
* $0.10 - $0.12 per CPU core-hour
* $0.15 - $0.18 per GB-month of storage
* $0.11 - $0.13 per GB outgoing bandwidth
* $0.09 - $0.11 per GB incoming bandwidth
SimpleDB Pricing:
* $0.14 per Amazon SimpleDB Machine Hour consumed
* Structured Data Storage - $1.50 per GB-month
* $0.100 per GB - all data transfer in
* $0.170 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out (more on the site)
Clearly Google priced their services to be competitive with Amazon. We may see a response by Amazon in the near feature, but the database storage cost for GAE is dramatically cheaper at $0.15 - $0.18 per GB-month vs $1.50 per GB-month.
Interestingly, Google's price is the same as Amazon's S3 (file storage) pricing. Google seems to think of database storage as more like file storage. That makes a certain amount of sense because BigTable is a layer on the Google File System. File system pricing may be the more appropriate price reference point.
On SimpleDB a 1TB database costs $1,500/month and BigTable costs in the $180/month range. As you grow into ever larger data sets the difference becomes even more compelling.
If you are a startup your need for funding just dropped another notch. It's hard to self-finance many thousands of dollars a month, but hundreds of dollars is an easy nut to make.
Still, Amazon's advantage is they support application clusters that can access the data for free within AWS. GAE excels at providing a scalable two tier architecture for displaying web pages. Doing anything else with your data has to be done outside GAE, which kicks up your bandwidth costs considerably. How much obviously depends on your application. But if your web site is of the more vanilla variety the cost savings could be game changing.
