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I like Scylla. I've been working with it for a while now, and it's a good alternative for transactional loads. It's a hell of a lot faster than Cassandra, and much much much much cheaper than DynamoDB. Cassandra has always felt like improvements came in fits and starts. I work at a Fortune 50 company, and Amazon quoted us ~$2-3 million a year to run our load on Dynamo (we were paying $350k/year for Aurora). With Scylla, we're looking at > $100k to get an order of magnitude better performance and a nice stable system that doesn't wake me up in the middle of the fucking night.

I was following Scylla since the beginning (only because I like their mascot), and it's actually sort of interesting to see what's going on with the company. I've spent the past few years designing things where transactional systems backed by Cassandra. This is the first time I've been able to use Scylla on someone else's dime, though. The unpleasantly big company I'm at right now is looking to replace a bunch of infrastructure with ScyllaDB (Couchbase, Cassandra, Elasticsearch, DynamoDB). It's catching on for sure, but it still doesn't return any results when I search Dice. It looks like Discord is hiring, though...




I'd love to hear how Dynamo would end up being $2-3 million a year They sure do a great job of convincing people that it's cheap so I'm curious where the cost seems to blow up?


If you are doing north of a million ops on DynamoDB you can quickly run into the $2-3 million a year range.

In this 2018 benchmark, we were able to calculate that a sustained, provisioned of only 160k write ops / 80k read ops for DynamoDB would cost >$500k per year:

https://www.scylladb.com/2018/12/13/scylla-vs-amazon-dynamod...

That was a few years ago. These days, according to our most current pricing you could do DynamoDB provisioned, 1 year reserved for $38,658/month, which is "only" $463,896 annually (pop up the "Details" button and choose "vs. DynamoDB"):

https://www.scylladb.com/pricing/?writes=160000&reads=80000&...

The same workload on Scylla Cloud would be only $7,442/month, or $89,304 annually.

If you wanted, say, 1m ops — 500k write / 500k read ops — on DynamoDB, that'll run you $131,078/month, or $1,572,936 per year.

https://www.scylladb.com/pricing/?writes=500000&reads=500000...

The same workload on Scylla Cloud would run $29,768 reserved/month, or $357,216 per annum — 77% cheaper.

Of course, all of this is just pure list price. Depending on volume you might be able to negotiate better pricing. However, you'd need a really steep discount for DynamoDB just to get back to Scylla Cloud's list price.

Let me know if you spot any math errors or omissions on my part.


Thanks for the response, Peter. I may shoot you an email with some additional questions.




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