Google Cloud is trying to market its Cloud Spanner in an interesting way. “Cloud Spanner now costs half as much as Amazon DynamoDB,” the blog is titled. Beyond price, does it score better than DynamoDB in other areas?
Google Cloud makes some performance improvements to Cloud Spanner: “now offers up to 50 percent more throughput and 2.5 times more storage per node than before.” Storage expands to 10TB per node as a result. The accompanying blog highlights not only the improvements but also how significantly cheaper the offering is than that of competitor AWS.
Cloud Spanner is a database service from Google Cloud. Amazon DynamoDB is AWS’ counterpart of this product. These fully managed products relieve IT professionals of the worries around hardware provisioning, installation, configuration, replication and other tasks of managing and scaling a database.
Improvements to Cloud Spanner
The improvements allow the Google Cloud service to process 3 billion jobs per second during peak performance. “With these changes, Spanner now offers up to two times better read throughput per dollar compared to Amazon DynamoDB for similar workloads,” write Jagdeep Singh, product manager at Google, and Pritam Shah, technical director for the company.
DynamoDB can handle 126 million at best, according to the authors. However, these are figures from actual measurements during Prime Day. However, Google gives the theoretical capabilities of the service, and on paper, services can always do more.
Battle with market leader
Google Cloud will not just open fire on AWS in the blog. Amazon’s cloud service is still the market leader. The latest figures from Synergy Research attribute AWS a market share of about 32 percent. Google Cloud has about a third of that, with 11 percent.
However, Google Cloud’s percentage of users increases a little each quarter, while AWS shows small fluctuations, but certainly not an upward trend. Moreover, the search giant’s cloud service posted a profit this year for the first time ever. Google Cloud, therefore, has the strengths of a structured cloud offering and can also redirect customers from its Workspace suite to Google Cloud.
The cloud provider has no intention of losing this positive evolution. As a result, it may increasingly want to compete with its competitors’ services or bring whole new solutions to the market. Either way, Google Cloud’s Cloud Spanner service is getting significant performance improvements without affecting the cost of the service. The changes will become available to customers in the coming months.
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