Amazon RDS vs Google Cloud Spanner comparison

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google are both solutions in the Database as a Service (DBaaS) category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.3, while Google is ranked #8 with an average rating of 9.3. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 25.6% mindshare in DS, compared to Google’s 3.9% mindshare. Additionally, 98% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Google users who would recommend it.

Amazon RDS

Read 52 Amazon RDS reviews

6,931 Views
5,722 Comparison Views

98% willing to recommend

Google Cloud Spanner

Read 5 Google Cloud Spanner reviews

1,044 Views
784 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Amazon RDS

Google Cloud Spanner

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Aug 12, 2024

Amazon RDS and Google Cloud Spanner are two leading database management solutions, each with distinctive strengths. Amazon RDS is noted for its ease of use and automated management, while Google Cloud Spanner offers superior scalability and global distribution.

Features: Amazon RDS is praised for its ease of use, automated backups, and support for multiple database engines. Google Cloud Spanner stands out for its horizontal scalability, global distribution, and strong consistency.

Room for Improvement: Amazon RDS users often request better performance monitoring tools, more transparent pricing, and enhanced tooling features. Google Cloud Spanner users desire improved compatibility with other database systems, enhanced user documentation, and an easier initial setup process.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Amazon RDS users find its deployment process straightforward and quick but some report that customer service response times are lacking. Google Cloud Spanner deployment is noted for its complexity due to sophisticated configurations, yet customer service is often highlighted as responsive and helpful.

Pricing and ROI: Users report that Amazon RDS generally offers lower setup costs and a quick return on investment, while Google Cloud Spanner has higher initial costs but provides significant value for large-scale deployments due to its advanced features.

To learn more, read our detailed Amazon RDS vs. Google Cloud Spanner Report (Updated: October 2024).

Buyer's Guide

Amazon RDS vs. Google Cloud Spanner

October 2024

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Customer Service

Sentiment score

8.3

Amazon RDS support quality varies by tier, with costs and regional differences impacting accessibility and user satisfaction.

No sentiment score available

No quotes available

For more quotes and insights, download the Amazon RDS report

No quotes available

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Room For Improvement

Sentiment score

7.0

Amazon RDS needs enhanced migration tools, support, security, and user interface, with improved integration, performance monitoring, and documentation.

No sentiment score available

Simplifying migration for those transitioning from on-premises to cloud environments.

Samuel Ebite

AICE Graduate at alx_africa

For more quotes and insights, download the Amazon RDS report

No quotes available

For more quotes and insights, download the Google Cloud Spanner report

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score

10.0

Amazon RDS is highly regarded for its scalability and user efficiency, despite some challenges with large data sets.

No sentiment score available

Its automated scaling, both in storage and instances, is vital as it eliminates manual interventions.

Samuel Ebite

AICE Graduate at alx_africa

For more quotes and insights, download the Amazon RDS report

No quotes available

For more quotes and insights, download the Google Cloud Spanner report

Setup Cost

No sentiment score available

Amazon RDS pricing is mixed; users value pay-as-you-go but find costs unpredictable, despite competitive features and flexibility.

No sentiment score available

While Azure provides great services, long-term plans on AWS are 20% to 30% cheaper.

Karthikeyan Katkam

AWS Engineer at Neurolov.ai

I find the pricing of Amazon RDS fair, as AWS operates on a pay-for-what-you-use model.

Samuel Ebite

AICE Graduate at alx_africa

For more quotes and insights, download the Amazon RDS report

No quotes available

For more quotes and insights, download the Google Cloud Spanner report

Stability Issues

Sentiment score

7.7

Amazon RDS is stable with reliable performance, successfully handling infrastructure changes, especially when properly configured with MySQL and Postgres.

No sentiment score available

Amazon RDS is very stable when deployed correctly across different zones with the right configurations.

Samuel Ebite

AICE Graduate at alx_africa

For more quotes and insights, download the Amazon RDS report

No quotes available

For more quotes and insights, download the Google Cloud Spanner report

Valuable Features

Sentiment score

9.0

Amazon RDS offers fully managed, scalable, and secure database services with automatic backups, supporting multiple databases and AWS integration.

No sentiment score available

Amazon RDS provides data encryption using services like KMS, crucial for securing high-sensitive data and meeting compliance requirements such as HIPAA or PCI DSS.

Samuel Ebite

AICE Graduate at alx_africa

Amazon RDS makes it easier for me to manage databases compared to traditional databases like MongoDB or local host servers.

Karthikeyan Katkam

AWS Engineer at Neurolov.ai

For more quotes and insights, download the Amazon RDS report

No quotes available

For more quotes and insights, download the Google Cloud Spanner report

Categories and Ranking

Amazon RDS

Ranking in Database as a Service (DBaaS)

1st

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

8.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Google Cloud Spanner

Ranking in Database as a Service (DBaaS)

8th

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2024, in the Database as a Service (DBaaS) category, the mindshare of Amazon RDS is 25.6%, down from 28.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Google Cloud Spanner is 3.9%, down from 3.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Database as a Service (DBaaS)

Featured Reviews

Udhay Prakash Pethakamsetty

Data Engineer Manager at Capgemini

Provides excellent authentication, authorization, integration, data protection, and autoscaling features

The product should support new databases. RocketDB is written in C++. It is useful when we work with Kafka. The product should support more databases and not just the standard four to five databases. It will help the users to explore new avenues and not be confined to the standard ones. The tool provides automatic backup, but the recovery is slow if something goes wrong. We need to wait for some time. If a failure happens, recovery takes some time. Meanwhile, we lose business. It would be great if it happens much faster. The cross-region replication settings are very complex. We need to do careful planning.

Read full review

Ethan Lo

Infrastructuer Security at Premise Data

A stable and scalable relational database that ensures a return on investment for its users

The most valuable feature of the solution is its scalability. Scalability comes with two options, among which Google Cloud Spanner can scale horizontally, compared to other relational databases that scale vertically. You can change Google Cloud Spanner's resource configuration, which is done through processing units. Suppose you set up Google Cloud Spanner initially with a hundred processing units, and then you run out of resources since your database used too much CPU. In the aforementioned scenario, you can scale up or down and face no downtime in the production phase. The solution's features are important when running a company twenty-four hours, seven days a week.

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

14%

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

University

Financial Services Firm

19%

Computer Software Company

15%

Retailer

11%

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon RDS?

The product's installation phase is easy.

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon RDS?

I would rate the pricing between six and seven. The cost is manageable because you can see the expense associated with each instance and utilize tools for tagging and cost control. However, a commo...

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What needs improvement with Amazon RDS?

They could provide better integration for the solution with Microsoft products. Although this may be challenging due to competitive interests, enhanced integration could significantly benefit users...

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What is your primary use case for Google Cloud Spanner?

Google Cloud Spanner has all the features of a traditional relational database, including schemas, SQL queries, ACID transactions, and provides excellent integration and monitoring tools as well as...

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What do you like most about Google Cloud Spanner?

Google Cloud Spanner is stable.

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Google Cloud Spanner?

Price-wise, I heard that Google Cloud Spanner is on the higher side. I am not sure if this is a rumor or if it's fake news, but I believe that having BigQuery and GCP together could be a little cos...

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Comparisons

MongoDB Atlas vs Amazon RDS

Compared 32% of the time

Google Cloud SQL vs Amazon RDS

Compared 22% of the time

Microsoft Azure SQL Database vs Amazon RDS

Compared 19% of the time

Oracle Database as a Service vs Amazon RDS

Compared 15% of the time

Oracle Exadata Cloud at Customer vs Amazon RDS

Compared 3% of the time

More Amazon RDS Competitors

MongoDB Atlas vs Google Cloud Spanner

Compared 14% of the time

Oracle Exadata Cloud at Customer vs Google Cloud Spanner

Compared 12% of the time

Google Cloud SQL vs Google Cloud Spanner

Compared 11% of the time

Oracle Database as a Service vs Google Cloud Spanner

Compared 9% of the time

Redis vs Google Cloud Spanner

Compared 7% of the time

More Google Cloud Spanner Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Amazon RDS

November 2024

Download Amazon RDS product report

Buyer's Guide

Database as a Service (DBaaS)

November 2024

Download Google Cloud Spanner product report

Also Known As

RDS

Google Spanner

Learn More

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Google

Overview

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is a web service that makes it easier to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. It provides cost-efficient, resizeable capacity for an industry-standard relational database and manages common database administration tasks.

Cloud Spanner is the first and only relational database service that is both strongly consistent and horizontally scalable. With Cloud Spanner you enjoy all the traditional benefits of a relational database: ACID transactions, relational schemas (and schema changes without downtime), SQL queries, high performance, and high availability. But unlike any other relational database service, Cloud Spanner scales horizontally, to hundreds or thousands of servers, so it can handle the highest of transactional workloads. With automatic scaling, synchronous data replication, and node redundancy, Cloud Spanner delivers up to 99.999% (five 9s) of availability for your mission critical applications. In fact, Google’s internal Spanner service has been handling millions of queries per second from many Google services for years.

Sample Customers

Edmodo

Streak, Optiva, Mixpanel

Buyer's Guide

Amazon RDS vs. Google Cloud Spanner

October 2024

Free Report: Amazon RDS vs. Google Cloud Spanner

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We monitor all Database as a Service (DBaaS) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.