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Google Cloud announced significant price-performance enhancements to its Cloud Spanner service, boasting remarkable cost savings and unmatched capabilities compared to Amazon DynamoDB. The upgrades include a 50% boost in throughput, a 2.5-fold increase in storage per node, and all of this comes at no additional cost to customers.
Google’s Cloud Spanner is already renowned for its high throughput, scalability, single-digit millisecond latency, and strong external-consistency semantics. But this time, it has upped the ante. These improvements, combined with a five 9s availability Service Level Agreement (SLA), are now available at just half the cost of Amazon DynamoDB for most workloads.
The enhancements are set to roll out to all Cloud Spanner customers over the coming months, with the promise of a seamless transition. Users may upgrade without the need for reprovisioning, downtime, or any user intervention.
A Solution for Every Organization
The price-performance improvements build on a history of continuous enhancement to increase value, boost performance, and reduce costs. Furthermore, Cloud Spanner offers consistent single-digit millisecond latencies for strongly-consistent reads and writes across multiple availability zones within the same region. With these latest changes, Cloud Spanner now offers up to twice the read throughput per dollar when compared to Amazon DynamoDB for similar workloads.
A Powerhouse Behind Google Services
Cloud Spanner isn’t just a solution for external customers: It’s a cornerstone of Google’s internal operations, supporting services like Ads, Gmail, and Photos. To put this into perspective, while Amazon DynamoDB processes 126 million queries per second at its peak, Cloud Spanner manages a staggering 3 billion queries per second, which is more than 20 times higher, and handles over 12 exabytes of data.
The improvements in Cloud Spanner’s price-performance give customers more flexibility to optimize their environments. The 50% increase in throughput enables customers to efficiently leverage Cloud Spanner for their relational and key-value workloads.
Meanwhile, each Spanner node can now accommodate 10TB of storage, compared to the previous 4TB, offering cost-effective data storage. Importantly, users are only billed for the storage they actually use.
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These changes represent a significant leap forward, as described by Ankit Srivastava, Distinguished Engineer at Uber:
“Spanner’s scalability & low operational cost is invaluable. The adoption of Spanner streamlined operational costs, improved overall reliability, and strengthened overall value by providing better throughput and performance for the same price.”
Andre da Costa Silva, CIO of CERC, echoed this sentiment:
“With the increase in throughput and storage per node, we’ve been able to improve our operational efficiency. A highly reliable, scalable, and cost-effective database like Spanner is key to our strategy.”
Availability and Pricing
Cloud Spanner’s price-performance improvements are now available in select regional and multi-region instance configurations. All other configurations are set to follow.
Storage upgrades will roll out in the coming months, and existing customers will not need to take any action to enjoy these enhancements.
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Users can learn more about what makes Spanner unique and try it for themselves, free for 90 days or at a competitive price starting from just $65 USD/month for a production-ready instance that scales with your business, all without downtime or disruptive re-architecture.
