Amazon DynamoDB vs Google Cloud Bigtable

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Amazon DynamoDB

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Amazon DynamoDB vs Google Cloud Bigtable: What are the differences?

Amazon DynamoDB: Fully managed NoSQL database service. All data items are stored on Solid State Drives (SSDs), and are replicated across 3 Availability Zones for high availability and durability. With DynamoDB, you can offload the administrative burden of operating and scaling a highly available distributed database cluster, while paying a low price for only what you use; Google Cloud Bigtable: The same database that powers Google Search, Gmail and Analytics. Google Cloud Bigtable offers you a fast, fully managed, massively scalable NoSQL database service that's ideal for web, mobile, and Internet of Things applications requiring terabytes to petabytes of data. Unlike comparable market offerings, Cloud Bigtable doesn't require you to sacrifice speed, scale, or cost efficiency when your applications grow. Cloud Bigtable has been battle-tested at Google for more than 10 years—it's the database driving major applications such as Google Analytics and Gmail.

Amazon DynamoDB and Google Cloud Bigtable belong to "NoSQL Database as a Service" category of the tech stack.

Some of the features offered by Amazon DynamoDB are:

  • Automated Storage Scaling – There is no limit to the amount of data you can store in a DynamoDB table, and the service automatically allocates more storage, as you store more data using the DynamoDB write APIs.
  • Provisioned Throughput – When creating a table, simply specify how much request capacity you require. DynamoDB allocates dedicated resources to your table to meet your performance requirements, and automatically partitions data over a sufficient number of servers to meet your request capacity. If your throughput requirements change, simply update your table's request capacity using the AWS Management Console or the Amazon DynamoDB APIs. You are still able to achieve your prior throughput levels while scaling is underway.
  • Fully Distributed, Shared Nothing Architecture – Amazon DynamoDB scales horizontally and can seamlessly scale a single table over hundreds of servers.

On the other hand, Google Cloud Bigtable provides the following key features:

  • Unmatched Performance: Single-digit millisecond latency and over 2X the performance per dollar of unmanaged NoSQL alternatives.
  • Open Source Interface: Because Cloud Bigtable is accessed through the HBase API, it is natively integrated with much of the existing big data and Hadoop ecosystem and supports Google’s big data products. Additionally, data can be imported from or exported to existing HBase clusters through simple bulk ingestion tools using industry-standard formats.
  • Low Cost: By providing a fully managed service and exceptional efficiency, Cloud Bigtable’s total cost of ownership is less than half the cost of its direct competition.

"Predictable performance and cost" is the primary reason why developers consider Amazon DynamoDB over the competitors, whereas "High performance" was stated as the key factor in picking Google Cloud Bigtable.

Lyft, New Relic, and Sellsuki are some of the popular companies that use Amazon DynamoDB, whereas Google Cloud Bigtable is used by Spotify, Resultados Digitais, and Rainist. Amazon DynamoDB has a broader approval, being mentioned in 430 company stacks & 173 developers stacks; compared to Google Cloud Bigtable, which is listed in 17 company stacks and 3 developer stacks.

Advice on Amazon DynamoDB and Google Cloud Bigtable

We are building a social media app, where users will post images, like their post, and make friends based on their interest. We are currently using Cloud Firestore and Firebase Realtime Database. We are looking for another database like Amazon DynamoDB; how much this decision can be efficient in terms of pricing and overhead?

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Replies (1)
William Frank
Data Science and Engineering at GeistM · | 2 upvotes · 100.5K views
Recommends

Hi, Akash,

I wouldn't make this decision without lots more information. Cloud Firestore has a much richer metamodel (document-oriented) than Dynamo (key-value), and Dynamo seems to be particularly restrictive. That is why it is so fast. There are many needs in most applications to get lightning access to the members of a set, one set at a time. Dynamo DB is a great choice. But, social media applications generally need to be able to make long traverses across a graph. While you can make almost any metamodel act like another one, with your own custom layers on top of it, or just by writing a lot more code, it's a long way around to do that with simple key-value sets. It's hard enough to traverse across networks of collections in a document-oriented database. So, if you are moving, I think a graph-oriented database like Amazon Neptune, or, if you might want built-in reasoning, Allegro or Ontotext, would take the least programming, which is where the most cost and bugs can be avoided. Also, managed systems are also less costly in terms of people's time and system errors. It's easier to measure the costs of managed systems, so they are often seen as more costly.

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Pros of Amazon DynamoDB
Pros of Google Cloud Bigtable
  • 62
    Predictable performance and cost
  • 56
    Scalable
  • 35
    Native JSON Support
  • 21
    AWS Free Tier
  • 7
    Fast
  • 3
    No sql
  • 3
    To store data
  • 2
    Serverless
  • 2
    No Stored procedures is GOOD
  • 1
    ORM with DynamoDBMapper
  • 1
    Elastic Scalability using on-demand mode
  • 1
    Elastic Scalability using autoscaling
  • 1
    DynamoDB Stream
  • 11
    High performance
  • 9
    Fully managed
  • 5
    High scalability

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Cons of Amazon DynamoDB
Cons of Google Cloud Bigtable
  • 4
    Only sequential access for paginate data
  • 1
    Scaling
  • 1
    Document Limit Size
    Be the first to leave a con

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    What is Amazon DynamoDB?

    With it , you can offload the administrative burden of operating and scaling a highly available distributed database cluster, while paying a low price for only what you use.

    What is Google Cloud Bigtable?

    Google Cloud Bigtable offers you a fast, fully managed, massively scalable NoSQL database service that's ideal for web, mobile, and Internet of Things applications requiring terabytes to petabytes of data. Unlike comparable market offerings, Cloud Bigtable doesn't require you to sacrifice speed, scale, or cost efficiency when your applications grow. Cloud Bigtable has been battle-tested at Google for more than 10 years—it's the database driving major applications such as Google Analytics and Gmail.

    Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

    What companies use Amazon DynamoDB?
    What companies use Google Cloud Bigtable?
    See which teams inside your own company are using Amazon DynamoDB or Google Cloud Bigtable.
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    What tools integrate with Amazon DynamoDB?
    What tools integrate with Google Cloud Bigtable?

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    What are some alternatives to Amazon DynamoDB and Google Cloud Bigtable?
    Google Cloud Datastore
    Use a managed, NoSQL, schemaless database for storing non-relational data. Cloud Datastore automatically scales as you need it and supports transactions as well as robust, SQL-like queries.
    MongoDB
    MongoDB stores data in JSON-like documents that can vary in structure, offering a dynamic, flexible schema. MongoDB was also designed for high availability and scalability, with built-in replication and auto-sharding.
    Amazon SimpleDB
    Developers simply store and query data items via web services requests and Amazon SimpleDB does the rest. Behind the scenes, Amazon SimpleDB creates and manages multiple geographically distributed replicas of your data automatically to enable high availability and data durability. Amazon SimpleDB provides a simple web services interface to create and store multiple data sets, query your data easily, and return the results. Your data is automatically indexed, making it easy to quickly find the information that you need. There is no need to pre-define a schema or change a schema if new data is added later. And scale-out is as simple as creating new domains, rather than building out new servers.
    MySQL
    The MySQL software delivers a very fast, multi-threaded, multi-user, and robust SQL (Structured Query Language) database server. MySQL Server is intended for mission-critical, heavy-load production systems as well as for embedding into mass-deployed software.
    Amazon S3
    Amazon Simple Storage Service provides a fully redundant data storage infrastructure for storing and retrieving any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web
    See all alternatives