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 #2 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 25.9% mindshare in DS, compared to Google’s 3.7% 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 53 Amazon RDS reviews

6,510 Views
5,468 Comparison Views

98% willing to recommend

Google Cloud Spanner

Read 5 Google Cloud Spanner reviews

975 Views
738 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Amazon RDS

Google Cloud Spanner

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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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: December 2024).

Buyer's Guide

Amazon RDS vs. Google Cloud Spanner

December 2024

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Categories and Ranking

Amazon RDS

Ranking in Database as a Service (DBaaS)

2nd

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

8.0

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 December 2024, in the Database as a Service (DBaaS) category, the mindshare of Amazon RDS is 25.9%, down from 28.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Google Cloud Spanner is 3.7%, down from 3.8% 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.

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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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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I recommend RDS because it makes your life super easy."

"It's a fully managed database, so that makes our life easier from the operational standpoint. That is the key, basically."

"The solution’s scalability, usability, and availability are valuable to us."

"One of the most valuable features is that it is serverless, so we don't have to worry about scaling."

"It is easy to use, flexible, and powerful."

"The tool is very easy to use and configure."

"Amazon RDS is very easy to use."

"The product's most valuable features are option groups, S3 integration, automated and scheduled snapshots, and cross-region replication."

More Amazon RDS pros

"Google Cloud Spanner is stable."

"It is a very scalable solution."

"The application deployment in the cloud is the best feature of the infrastructure."

"We can scale the solution if we need to."

"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."

Cons

"It would be better if it integrated seamlessly with Microsoft products. Our clients use the Microsoft Tally application server. We already tried to create a reputation from, for example, an on-premises environment from our client to Amazon RDS using Microsoft Tally server, and we couldn't do that because we didn't have a strong user in RDS. We couldn't create a reputation from an on-premises environment from the Microsoft Tally server to RDS. I think that it would be a good implementation, and it would help us with this case."

"Amazon RDS should have a more user-friendly graphical user interface and include better database management options."

"You can only get access from the sales support. That means if you want to buy something or renew your subscription or upgrade, all these services are easily available. Yet, if you would like to get some technical support, you have to pay for it. You have to pay for an additional subscription."

"The support team of Amazon RDS provides us with some links to go through whenever we face some issues, but it doesn't work for us."

"In the next release, it would be great to have access to core parameters to improve or tweak the performance."

"One notable improvement that could enhance the database management experience, particularly during migration scenarios, is the accessibility of the root user."

"The product's high price is an area of concern where improvements are required."

"I also don't think it's very scalable."

More Amazon RDS cons

"Google came up with something called Cloud Spanner Emulator, which fails to work like the real product if I want to develop some code and run a database locally on my machine."

"The tool lacks to offer AI features."

"The tool needs to improve horizontal scaling."

"I want to improve the deployment of cameras and surveillance infrastructure."

"The cost can be a bit high."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Amazon RDS is an expensive solution."

"Amazon RDS is cheaper compared to other tools."

"The platform pricing is on the higher side, but given its capabilities and ease of use, it remains competitive."

"The price of Amazon RDS is reasonable."

"We are paying for a service license."

"The substantial initial credit and cost-effectiveness make Amazon an attractive option."

"The cost is manageable because you can see the expense associated with each instance and utilize tools for tagging and cost control."

"AWS is becoming pretty expensive because cheap or absolutely free services have become paid services. Amazon RDS is not an expensive product, but Amazon's ecosystem is becoming increasingly expensive."

More Amazon RDS pricing and cost advice

"Google Cloud Spanner is an expensive solution."

"Price-wise, I heard that Google Cloud Spanner is on the higher side."

"It is expensive."

"The solution is expensive."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

14%

Computer Software Company

13%

University

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

16%

Computer Software Company

14%

Retailer

12%

Manufacturing Company

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.

See all answers

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

I find the pricing of Amazon RDS fair, as AWS operates on a pay-for-what-you-use model. Auto scalability helps handle varying demand, making it cost-efficient without overprovisioning resources.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Amazon RDS?

For improvements, Amazon RDS could work on more features for multi-availability zone deployment to enhance higher availability, and on simplifying migration for those transitioning from on-premises...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

What do you like most about Google Cloud Spanner?

Google Cloud Spanner is stable.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

Comparisons

MongoDB Atlas vs Amazon RDS

Compared 31% of the time

Google Cloud SQL vs Amazon RDS

Compared 23% of the time

Microsoft Azure SQL Database vs Amazon RDS

Compared 18% of the time

Oracle Database as a Service vs Amazon RDS

Compared 16% of the time

Oracle Exadata Cloud at Customer vs Amazon RDS

Compared 4% of the time

More Amazon RDS Competitors

MongoDB Atlas vs Google Cloud Spanner

Compared 15% 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 10% of the time

SingleStore vs Google Cloud Spanner

Compared 9% of the time

Oracle Database as a Service vs Google Cloud Spanner

Compared 7% of the time

More Google Cloud Spanner Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Amazon RDS

December 2024

Download Amazon RDS product report

Buyer's Guide

Database as a Service (DBaaS)

December 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

December 2024

Free Report: Amazon RDS vs. Google Cloud Spanner

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