The price of Amazon’s DynamoDB is now half that of Google’s Cloud Spanner “for most workloads,” the company claims. Google also doesn’t want you to overlook it.
In a statement released today, Google said that Cloud Spanner, a distributed, decoupled relational database service hosted on Google Cloud, is now more effective in computation and storage, resulting in what Google calls “significant” cost savings for users.
The read-throughput of Cloud Spanner has risen by 50%. Additionally, each Spanner node—a grouping of computing resources such as CPUs, RAM, and storage—can now support ten terabytes of storage instead of 4 TB in the past.
Google says the improvements are already available for regional and multi-regional instance configurations and will be available to all Spanner users in the upcoming months. In the next few weeks, we will see storage enhancements.
Google compares Spanner, which handles 3 billion queries per second, to Amazon’s DynamoDB, which Google estimates processes 126 million requests per second at its peak.
Without further explanation, Google product managers Jagdeep Singh and Pritam Shah stated in the blog post that “with these changes, Spanner now offers up to 2x better read throughput per dollar compared to Amazon DynamoDB for similar workloads.”
The “126 million” number was taken from a recent blog post by Amazon about Prime Day, which states that at their height, AmazonDB-powered, Amazon-owned properties and services handled 126 million requests per second. But that is merely a measure of traffic on Prime Day; it is not the theoretical throughput limit of DynamoDB.
In fact, it was challenging for me to determine the maximum queries per second for DynamoDB. It isn’t easy with Amazon.
However, this does not imply that Cloud Spanner is less capable than Google’s promotional materials portray it. According to AWS documentation from 2021, DynamoDB can handle “millions” rather than “billions” of queries per second at its peak. The reality, however, could be more apparent than what the press release portrays, as is frequently the case.
Regarding Google’s claim that Cloud Spanner is currently “half the cost” of DynamoDB. That heavily depends on workload, which Google, to its credit, acknowledges. Starting at $65 per month for a production-ready Cloud Spanner instance, DynamoDB may be used for practically nothing with per-request pricing.
The search engine giant is attempting to gain ground on the market leader AWS by stepping up its rhetoric. In Q4 2022, Google Cloud’s market share increased to 11% from 6%, ironically the same quarter that Cloud Spanner was introduced. However, AWS has a commanding edge with 34%.
It’s important to note that Google Cloud is now objectively in better condition than previously. With a 28% increase in sales to over $8 billion in Q2, the Google division reported its second consecutive profitable quarter for Google Cloud.
