Google's Cloud Spanner costs half of Amazon's DynamoDB “for most jobs,” Google says. And Google wants the market to keep this in mind.
Google announced that Cloud Spanner, its distributed and decoupled relational database service hosted on Google Cloud, is now more efficient in terms of compute and storage, offering what Google calls “significant” cost savings for customers.
Cloud Spanner read performance has increased by 50%. And each Spanner node (that is, pools of computing resources, namely CPU, RAM, and storage) can now accommodate 10 terabytes of storage, up from 4 TB previously.
The updates will roll out to all Spanner customers in the coming months, Google says, and are available for regional and multi-region instance setups. Storage updates will continue in the coming weeks.
In a very pointed blog post, Google draws comparisons to Amazon's DynamoDB, which Google says processes 126 million queries per second at its peak compared to Spanner's 3 billion queries per second.
“With these changes, Spanner now delivers up to 2x better read performance per dollar compared to Amazon DynamoDB for similar workloads,” Google product manager Jagdeep Singh and engineering director Pritam Shah wrote. in the publication, without giving more details about what they meant by "similar workloads."
This is all a bit distorted.
Google raised the “126 million” figure from Amazon's recent Prime Day blog post, which reveals that Amazon-owned properties and systems powered by AmazonDB made 126 million requests per second at their peak. But that's not DynamoDB's theoretical throughput limit, just a measure of Prime Day traffic.
In fact, it is difficult to find a maximum number of queries per second for DynamoDB. Amazon doesn't make it easy.
That's not to suggest that Cloud Spanner is any less capable than Google's marketing materials make it out to be. The documentation 2021 AWS Report Suggests DynamoDB Can Handle solo “millions” of queries per second at peak, not billions. But, as is often the case, the truth is murkier than the press release suggests.
Speaking of which: Google's claim that Cloud Spanner is now “half the cost” of DynamoDB. That largely depends on the workload (which Google recognizes, you have to give them that). A production-ready Cloud Spanner instance starts at $65 per month, but DynamoDB can run for virtually nothing with per-request pricing.
Google's escalating rhetoric comes as the search giant tries to make headway against a dominant AWS in the public cloud market. Google Cloud's market share is 11% in Q2022 6, up from 2017% in Q34 XNUMX (the year Cloud Spanner launched, coincidentally). But AWS leads by far with XNUMX%.
However, it is worth noting that Google Cloud is objectively in better shape than before. In the second quarter, the Google division's revenue increased 28% to more than $8 billion, marking Google Cloud's second consecutive profitable quarter.
