Google Cloud has announced “significant price-performance improvements” for Cloud Spanner, its database management and storage service, which landed Amazon in hot water.
Group Product Manager Jagdeep Singh and Technical Director Pritam Shah compared Cloud Spanner to Amazon’s DynamoDB, which costs twice as much.
Despite significant improvements in Cloud Spanner’s performance, Google hasn’t revised its pricing, making the latest version more cost-effective for businesses and a bigger threat to competing services.
Google Cloud Spanner has bold claims
The headlines of the update are “up to 50% increase in throughput and 2.5x storage per node” compared to previous latency figures of a few milliseconds.
Google Cloud says that “Spanner now delivers up to 2x better read throughput per dollar compared to Amazon DynamoDB for comparable workloads,” making it essentially half the price of Amazon’s counterpart.
Singh and Shah also reference an Amazon post that highlighted DynamoDB’s ability to handle 126 million queries per second at peak times. Google promises to improve this 20 times, to 3 billion.
The rivalry between many of the biggest tech companies has increased lately as they go head-to-head in antitrust cases, with complaints being filed seemingly left, right and center.
Amazon, together with Microsoft, is now facing a CMA investigation in Britain Ofcom complained about its dominance in the cloud market. Both companies together account for 70-80% in Great Britain, with a roughly equal split.
As consumer focus will inevitably shift away from the leading players, Google could see this as an opportunity to plug its own technologies. It says that improvements are now available in “select regional and multi-region instance configurations,” and that further improvements will be rolled out in the coming months.