Google Cloud has unveiled substantial price-performance improvements for Cloud Spanner, its database management and storage service, and in doing so, has taken a direct shot at Amazon. Google’s Group Product Manager, Jagdeep Singh, and Director of Engineering, Pritam Shah, highlighted the enhanced capabilities of Cloud Spanner, comparing it to Amazon’s DynamoDB, which comes at double the cost.
Notably, Google has significantly improved Cloud Spanner’s performance without altering its pricing structure, making it more cost-effective for businesses and a more formidable competitor to rival services.
The key highlights of this update include “up to a 50% increase in throughput and 2.5 times the storage per node” compared to its previous version, all while maintaining single-digit millisecond latency figures.
Google Cloud proudly asserts that “Spanner now offers up to 2x better read throughput per dollar compared to Amazon DynamoDB for similar workloads,” essentially making it a more budget-friendly alternative to Amazon’s offering.
Singh and Shah also reference an Amazon post that boasted DynamoDB’s ability to process 126 million queries per second at its peak. Google now promises a staggering 20-fold improvement, scaling up to 3 billion queries per second.
The competition among major tech companies has been intensifying lately, with antitrust cases becoming a prominent battleground. Google and Amazon, along with Microsoft, are facing scrutiny in the UK, with Ofcom raising concerns about their dominance in the cloud market. These two giants together account for 70-80% of the market in the UK, sharing an almost equal split.
As consumer attention begins to shift away from the dominant players, Google views this as an opportunity to showcase its own technology. The company notes that these improvements are currently available in “select regional and multi-region instance configurations,” with further enhancements slated for rollout in the coming months.
