ScyllaDB’s New Cloud Challenges DynamoDB Cost, Performance

High-performance database system provider ScyllaDB has launched a new database cloud service that promises to rival the performance of Amazon Web Services‘ DynamoDB key store, while costing only half as much, the company claims.

The new service, called ScyllaDB X Cloud, uses the database’s tablet-based architecture to rapidly scale up and scale down individual databases, using disk space more efficiently and speeding network transfers.

The company claimed these numbers: A sample ScyllaDB X Cloud database can grow from a baseline of 100,000 operations per second to 2 million OPS, while maintaining a single-digit millisecond P99 latency as it scales.

Such smooth scalability can ensure a number of things for a system, including that it won’t suffer performance degradation due to lag. and that the team won’t overprovision hardware in the operations of such traffic suddenly arriving, which can be a real money waster.

In fact, ScyllaDB now guarantees that ScyllaDB X Cloud costs are 50% of DynamoDB costs, or lower.

Many Operations per Second with ScyllaDB

The open source ScyllaDB distributed NoSQL wide-column data store was built especially for workloads that require high-throughput, ultra-low latency. Many of the workloads it runs can exceed a million operations per second. It is built on a shared-nothing architecture, good for jobs such as fraud detection.

Thus far, the database system has been used by companies such as Comcast, Crypto.com, Discord, Disney, Expedia, Samsung, Starbucks and Zillow.

Part of the performance boost comes from tablets. Introduced in ScyllaDB version 6, tablets do away with the traditional ring architecture used by distributed databases.

Instead, the database is split into fixed-size, fully independent fragments called tablets, each approximately 5GB in size. Each tablet serves queries independently. As the tablets fill up, new one ones are spun up within seconds after joining a cluster.

The Features of ScyllaDB X Cloud

Key X Cloud includes a number key features, according to the company:

• Autoscaling: The user defines the CPU footprint for the cluster, and the system scales to storage to match.
• Higher utilization: Storage runs at 90% utilization, with no clipping, thus reducing the number of servers needed, compared to an industry standard of 70%.
• Compression: ScyllaDB can compress data up to 80%, reducing storage and networking costs.
• Node size variety: Nodes can be very large, spanning 128 cores, or very small (two nodes), allowing for more granular scaling.
• Faster data streaming: The cloud service runs on ARM Graviton4-powered I8g or I8ge instances, and, with the compression gains mentioned above, can move data 25 times, faster, according to the company.

The new release also includes ScyllaDB capabilities such as change data capture, materialized views, and secondary indexes.

An Alternative to DynamoDB

The company has seen an increasing number of organizations consider switching from AWS’ DynamoDB to ScyllaDB for performance improvements, ScyllaDB CEO Dor Laor told The New Stack.

That ScyllaDB X Cloud is a managed service will also keep management costs low, Laor noted, as fewer engineers will be needed to fine tune the database.

In its product-release statement, ScyllaDB shared case studies from Freshworks, a Software as a Service provider, and Yieldmo, an advertising platform:

• Freshworks, according to a company representative quoted in the ScyllaDB announcement, reported that it found DynamoDB to be difficult to work with due to its limitation in the size of items it can accept (about 400KB), which forced the company to split the data into multiple records.
• Yieldmo found it was able to migrate a workload from DynamoDB to ScyllaDB in only a few days using one engineer.

ScyllaDB can be used to run DynamoDB workloads through Alternator, a DynamoDB-compatible API.