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Amazon DynamoDB vs Azure Cosmos DB vs Google Cloud Bigtable: What are the differences?
# Introduction
Key differences between Amazon DynamoDB, Azure Cosmos DB, and Google Cloud Bigtable are outlined below:
1. **Data Structure and Model**: Amazon DynamoDB uses a key-value data model with optional support for secondary indexes, Azure Cosmos DB offers a multi-model approach supporting key-value, document, column-family, graph, and Azure Table storage data models, whereas Google Cloud Bigtable is a wide-column store allowing for high-speed storage and retrieval of structured data.
2. **Consistency and Availability**: DynamoDB provides eventual consistency by default with options for strong consistency, Azure Cosmos DB offers five consistency levels to choose from to achieve the desired trade-off between consistency and availability, and Google Cloud Bigtable guarantees high availability and durability but sacrifices consistency in favor of performance.
3. **Scalability**: DynamoDB scales horizontally by increasing read/write capacity units, Azure Cosmos DB provides global distribution and autoscaling based on workload patterns for seamless scalability, and Google Cloud Bigtable offers automatic sharding for handling large amounts of data by distributing it across multiple nodes.
4. **Pricing and Costs**: DynamoDB pricing is based on provisioned throughput capacity and storage used, Azure Cosmos DB follows a pay-as-you-go model charging for throughput, storage, and data transfer, while Google Cloud Bigtable offers pricing based on the amount of storage used and network egress.
5. **Query Language Support**: Amazon DynamoDB supports queries using a SQL-like syntax through the Query and Scan operations, Azure Cosmos DB allows for querying data using SQL, MongoDB, Gremlin, Table, and Cassandra APIs, and Google Cloud Bigtable offers limited querying capabilities with filters but no full SQL support.
6. **Ecosystem Integration**: DynamoDB integrates seamlessly with other AWS services like Lambda, S3, and IAM for a holistic cloud experience, Azure Cosmos DB integrates with Azure services such as Azure Functions, Logic Apps, and Event Grid for building end-to-end solutions, while Google Cloud Bigtable integrates well with Google Cloud Platform services such as Dataflow, Dataproc, and BigQuery for analytics and processing.
In Summary, Amazon DynamoDB, Azure Cosmos DB, and Google Cloud Bigtable differ in their data models, consistency levels, scalability options, pricing models, query language support, and ecosystem integrations to cater to diverse cloud storage and processing needs.
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?
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.
Pros of Amazon DynamoDB
- Predictable performance and cost62
- Scalable56
- Native JSON Support35
- AWS Free Tier21
- Fast7
- No sql3
- To store data3
- Serverless2
- No Stored procedures is GOOD2
- ORM with DynamoDBMapper1
- Elastic Scalability using on-demand mode1
- Elastic Scalability using autoscaling1
- DynamoDB Stream1
Pros of Azure Cosmos DB
- Best-of-breed NoSQL features28
- High scalability22
- Globally distributed15
- Automatic indexing over flexible json data model14
- Tunable consistency10
- Always on with 99.99% availability sla10
- Javascript language integrated transactions and queries7
- Predictable performance6
- High performance5
- Analytics Store5
- Rapid Development2
- No Sql2
- Auto Indexing2
- Ease of use2
Pros of Google Cloud Bigtable
- High performance11
- Fully managed9
- High scalability5
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Cons of Amazon DynamoDB
- Only sequential access for paginate data4
- Scaling1
- Document Limit Size1
Cons of Azure Cosmos DB
- Pricing18
- Poor No SQL query support4