GCP – Cloud Spanner is now half the cost of Amazon DynamoDB, and with strong consistency and single-digit ms latency

Today, we announced significant price-performance improvements for Cloud Spanner, now providing up to 50% increase in throughput and 2.5 times the storage per node than before, with no change in price. Spanner’s high throughput, virtually unlimited scale, single-digit millisecond latency, five 9s availability SLA, and strong external-consistency semantics are now available at half the cost of Amazon DynamoDB for most workloads. These upgrades will be rolled out to all Spanner customers in the coming months, without the need for reprovisioning, downtime, or any user action.

Organizations of all sizes and across all industries are increasingly looking to accelerate digital transformation and power AI-driven innovation. However, demands are increasing, while budgets are constrained. Customers choose Spanner to future-proof their applications with high performance and availability at virtually unlimited scale. Spanner is a no-compromise database for relational and non-relational workloads that removes stress from managing databases with zero-touch maintenance. As data volumes grow and applications demand more from their operational databases, customers seek cost-optimal ways to support that growth.

The price-performance changes we announced today build on a track record of continuous improvements to increase value, enhance performance, and lower costs. Additionally, Spanner delivers predictable single-digit milliseconds latencies for strongly-consistent reads and writes across multiple availability zones in the same region. Superior price-performance, familiar SQL, no-maintenance downtime, and a five 9s of availability SLA make Spanner an excellent choice not just for relational data, but also for read-heavy key-value workloads. With these changes, Spanner now offers up to 2x better read throughput per dollar compared to Amazon DynamoDB for similar workloads.

Spanner is used ubiquitously inside of Google, supporting services such as; Ads, Gmail and Photos. According to the Amazon Prime Day blog post, DynamoDB processes 126 million queries per second at peak. Spanner on the other hand processes 3 billion queries per second at peak, which is more than 20x higher, and has more than 12 exabytes of data under management.

Cloud Spanner’s new price-performance improvements make it possible to grow more cost effectively by optimizing both compute and storage:

Compute: Thanks to the 50% throughput improvement, customers can leverage Spanner for their relational and key-value workloads in a cost effective way.Storage: Each Spanner node can now accommodate 10TB of storage, compared to 4TB previously. This enables customers to cost effectively store and manage data. Even with the increased capacity, Spanner users still only pay for the storage they actually use.

In other words, Spanner customers now have a lot more flexibility in optimizing their Spanner environments.

“Spanner is an important component for Uber’s essential operations. As we scale and expand our global footprint, Spanner’s scalability & low operational cost is invaluable. Prior to integrating Spanner, our data management framework demanded a lot of oversight and operational effort, escalating both complexity and expenditure. Traditional workarounds like sharding and eventual consistency also posed barriers to development speed. The adoption of Spanner streamlined operational costs, improved overall reliability, and strengthened overall value by providing better throughput and performance for the same price.” – Ankit Srivastava, Distinguished Engineer, Uber

“Spanner’s recent performance improvements have been a welcome change for CERC. With the increase in throughput and storage per node, we’ve been able to improve our operational efficiency. As we deliver transformative experiences to our customer, a highly reliable, scalable and cost effective database like Spanner is key to our strategy.” – Andre da Costa Silva, CIO, CERC

Cloud Spanner’s price-performance improvements are now available in select regional and multi-region instance configurations, with all other configurations to follow. Storage upgrades will start rolling out in the coming months. You do not need to do anything to take advantage of these improvements, and you will continue to be billed at your current rate. Learn more about what makes Spanner unique and how it’s being used today. Or try it yourself for free for 90 days, or for as little as $65 USD/month for a production-ready instance that grows with your business, without downtime or disruptive re-architecture.