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New Ways to Reduce
Database Costs with
ScyllaDB
Tzach Livyatan, VP Strategy, ScyllaDB
Guilherme Nogueira, Technical Director, ScyllaDB
Introductions
Guilherme Nogueira (Gui), Technical Director at ScyllaDB
+ Previously Solutions Architect
+ Publishing
+ Streaming
+ Automotive
+ Helping users be successful at scale
Tzach Livyatan, VP Product at ScyllaDB
+ Long career in development, system engineering and product management
+ NoSQL enthusiast
Agenda
+ Why do cloud DBs have a cost issue?
+ What is ScyllaDB?
+ Reduce cost with ScyllaDB
+ Reduce cost with ScyllaDB Cloud
+ What's coming?
+ Takeaways
Question: What is the main database for your data-intensive workloads?
● ScyllaDB Enterprise/Cloud
● Cassandra
● DynamoDB
● MongoDB
● ScyllaDB Open Source (!)
● Others (let us know in the chat!)
Poll time
● Large datasets
● Read-heavy
○ Additional Caches
● Write-heavy
○ Payload sizes
● High Availability scenarios
○ Multi AZ/region
○ Multiple replicas
● Network
○ A.K.A. the Cloud Tax
Why do cloud DBs have a cost issue?
DynamoDB bill shock
+ Scales with workload
+ But more often than not, surprises users
+ In most of the cases
+ 2x payload = 2x cost
+ Simple, right?
+ Writes costs 5x more than reads
+ Cost multipliers:
+ Indexes, Global Tables, DAX…
Provisioned
On-Demand
What is ScyllaDB?
5X higher throughput
20X lower latency
75% TCO savings
Founded by designers
of KVM Hypervisor
“ScyllaDB stands apart...It’s the rare product that
exceeds my expectations.”
– Martin Heller, InfoWorld contributing editor and reviewer
“For 99.9% of applications, ScyllaDB delivers all the
power a customer will ever need, on workloads that
other databases can’t touch – and at a fraction of the
cost of an in-memory solution.”
– Adrian Bridgwater, Forbes senior contributor
Gamechanging Database
9
Shard-per-Core
Unique Close-to-Metal Architecture
Built in C++
Everything
Asynchronous
Shared Nothing Shard per Core Specialized Cache
Network
Processor NUMA
Storage
Shards (per core)
uniqu
e
ScyllaDB technology
Guaranteed SLA
Perfect horizontal & Vertical Scale
1000 Nodes Cluster
8000 Cluster
K8S Deployment
+200TB per Node >256 Cores per Node
1B Operations
per Second
Userspace
I/O Scheduler
Disk
Query
Commitlog
Compaction
Queue
Queue
Queue
0.5msec
Shards (per core)
uniqu
e
ScyllaDB technology
Active/active, replicated, auto-sharded
11
App
App
App
App
App
App
CL= Local
Quorum
CL= One
Tunable, Eventual Consistency
+ Part of ScyllaDB Cloud
+ Index ScyllaDB Data using CQL API
+ High Throughput per core
+ Low Consistent Latency
ScyllaDB
Vector Search
12
Question: Do you plan or already use Vector Search on your apps?
● Multiple places
● Single use-case
● Plan to use soon
● Unsure
● No plans
Poll time
+400 Gamechangers Leverage ScyllaDB
Seamless experiences
across content + devices
Corporate fleet
management
Real-time analytics 2,000,000 SKU -commerce
management
Video recommendation
management
Low-latency global sports
betting
Real time fraud detection for
6M daily transactions
Uber scale, mission critical
chat & messaging app
Network security threat
detection
Power ~50M X1 DVRs with
billions of reqs/day
Precision healthcare via
Edison AI
Inventory hub for retail
operations
Property listings and
updates
Cryptocurrency exchange
app
Geography-based
recommendations
Global operations- Avon,
Body Shop + more
Predictable performance
for on sale surges
GPS-based exercise
tracking
Serving dynamic live
streams at scale
Powering India's top
social media platform
Personalized
advertising to players
Distribution of game
assets in Unreal Engine
Real-time ML-driven
recommendations
Connecting millions of
people around the globe
Reduce cost
with ScyllaDB
Up to 3 times better compression, less network cost overhead.
Dictionary Compression - Network
Up to 3 times better compression, less storage usage.
Dictionary Compression - Storage
Introducing Amazon EC2 I8g and I8ge
Cost Optimization
Same instance price → Lower TCO
User Experience
Low Consistent Latency → Better UX
Cloud Native Agility
Seamless elasticity with X Cloud
Performance & Efficiency
2x Higher throughput → ½ number of instances
Compute Bound
Max Throughput - i4i / i8g
Storage Bound
Max Throughput - i3en / i8ge
Introduced in 2026.1, Trie-Based SSTable Index (ms format) are now the default.
“ms” format is significantly more memory-efficient than the older "me" format, by keeping only
hot parts of the index in RAM
Trie-Based SSTable Index
21
Eliminate DynamoDB bill shock
+ Scales with workload
+ But more often than not, surprises users
+ In most of the cases
+ 2x payload = 2x cost
+ Simple, right?
+ Writes costs 5x more than reads
+ Cost multipliers:
+ Indexes, Global Tables, DAX…
Provisioned
On-Demand
Reduce cost with
ScyllaDB Cloud
● X Cloud
● Zone aware
● Flexible Pricing
Tablets!
True Elastic Scaling
90% Storage Utilization
Current Workload
Consistent 100K ops (33.4k per node)
1TB per AZ, 3TB used by the cluster
Storage
Time to Scale the Cluster
Edit the
Scaling Policy
Edit Scaling Policy
3 nodes
Update to 120 vCPU to support
10x workload (1 Mops)
X Cloud automatically
identifies the best fit by adding
3 x i8g.8xlarge Mixed Instance
Size “Heterogeneous Cluster”
Save to start
scaling
Cluster Rebalancing
00:24:00
New nodes already serving requests
Tablets rebalancing
1M Ops
Onwards…
Instance view, doing 1Mops
P99 Reads & Writes below 5ms
Question: At what scale do your apps run?
● Low (<1TB, <10K ops/s)
● Medium (1-5TB, <80K ops/s)
● High (10+TB, >100K ops/s)
● Extreme (PBs of data, >1M ops/s)
Poll time
Zone Aware App
is critical
Active/Active, replicated, auto-sharded
35
Multi-zone Deployment
us-east-1a
us-east-1b
us-east-1c
Active/Active, replicated, auto-sharded
36
Single-zone Deployment
us-east-1a
Customer VPC
ScyllaDB
Cloud VPC
Client Apps residing in the same AZ as ScyllaDB “Racks” (Good!)
Rack 2
Zone A Zone B Zone C Zone D
Client App
Client App
Client App
Rack 1 Rack 3
Customer VPC
ScyllaDB
Cloud VPC
Client Apps residing different AZ as ScyllaDB “Racks” (Not Good!)
Rack 1 Rack 2 Rack 3
Zone A Zone B Zone C Zone D
Client App
Every interaction has egress fees
$0.01/gb!!
Zone A Zone B Zone C
Customer VPC
ScyllaDB
Cloud VPC
Zone D Zone E Zone F
Client Apps residing in the same AZ and different as ScyllaDB
“Racks” Without Rack Aware
Client App Client App Client App Client App Client App Client App
Rack 1 Rack 2 Rack 3
Client App
Zone A Zone B Zone C
Client App
Client Apps residing in the same AZ and different as ScyllaDB
“Racks” With Rack Aware
Client App
Customer VPC
ScyllaDB
Cloud VPC
Rack 1 Rack 2 Rack 3
Zone D Zone E Zone F
Client App Client App Client App
Zone aware network customer example
Cost Basis: 100k op/s of 1kb each
Traffic: 360GB/hour → $7.2/hour → $63k/Year
Cross-zone Rate: $0.01/GB * {in, out}
Quorum Reads: $0!
+ Client to coordinator: $0
(same zone)
+ Coordinator to itself: $0
(token aware)
+ Replica traffic: ~$0
(checksum only)
Zone unaware: $126k
Quorum Writes: $126k
+ Client/Coord: $0
(same zone/token aware)
+ To 2 replicas: $126k
+ With 50% Compression: $63k
Zone unaware: $189k
THE BOTTOM LINE
$63k vs $315k
ScyllaDB Zone-Aware Savings
Flexible Pricing
Reserved Capacity
Reserved
Reserved + On Demand
Reserved
On Demand
Reserved + Flex Credit
Reserved
Flex Credit
Reserved + Flex Credit
What's coming - more way to reduce cost
Thin Replica with Strong data consistency
Tiered Storage
Vector Search - improve performance, Text Search, Hybrid and BM25
Much more…
Relevant?
Let us know!
Performance Improvements
Trie Indexes
Compact index structure for faster
lookups and reduced CPU usage by
25-35%.
Dictionary Compression
ZSTD-dictionary compression for improved storage efficiency
and performance.
Rapid Elasticity
Concurrent tablet migration allows Scale-in as fast as
scale-out, dramatically reducing TCO.
ARM Optimization
Optimized for new AWS i8g and i8ge families, delivering up
to 50% better performance.
Question: Which cost saving measure do you think applies most to your use-cases?
● Network compression (reduce the cloud tax)
● Storage compression (shrink dataset size)
● Newer instance types
● X Cloud / Flex Credits
● Other? Use the chat
Poll time
Nowogrodzka 21
00-511 Warszawa, Poland
United States
800 W El Camino Real Suite 180
Mountain View, CA 94040 USA
Israel
Maskit 4
Herzliya, Israel 4673304
www.scylladb.com
@scylladb
Poland
Stay in Touch
Tzach Livyatan
tzach@scylladb.com
Guilherme Nogueira (Gui)
guilherme.nogueira@scylladb.com
Thank you
for joining us today.
@scylladb scylladb/
slack.scylladb.com
@scylladb company/scylladb/
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