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Amazon likes to respond to Google with it's own price drops and product launches. It's telling that their announcements are orthogonal instead of direct competi

by xapata 10y ago

Amazon likes to respond to Google with it's own price drops and product launches. It's telling that their announcements are orthogonal instead of direct competition with Spanner. When Google announced Spanner back in 2012, I'm sure Amazon and Microsoft started teams to reproduce their own versions. Spanner is not just software. The private network reduces partitions. GPS and atomic clocks for every machine help synchronize time globally. There won't be a Hadoop equivalent for Spanner, unless it includes the hardware spec.

elvinyung 10y ago
Amazon already has Aurora: https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/details/ https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/details/ You're right that there's literally nothing else out there that has tight synchronization using atomic clocks, though.
- xapata 10y ago
  And because of that, Aurora's multi-zone replicas are read-only. I just noticed Google says the cross-region feature is coming later in 2017. Amazon might be planning to announce a similar change for Aurora in the coming months.
- user5994461 10y ago
  Aurora is a toy compared to Spanner. Single region, limited backups and replication topologies, limited performances. There is yet to see if Spanner can achieve the expectations, if it does, it's a game changer.
  - xapata 10y ago
    > achieve the expectations It has for Google internally. No reason why they can't share the service externally.
    - discodave 10y ago
      Actually, there are lots of reasons why it's hard to share a service externally. Making a service public means you have to deal with lots of new problems like billing, abuse, dealing with lots of small users instead of a few large ones, stronger backwards compatibility requirements and so-forth.
      - xapata 10y ago
        Yes, but those are orthogonal to the scaling issues that I presume user5994461 was thinking of.
        discodave 10y ago
        That's kind of the point, when you make a service like Cloud Spanner public you create new scaling dimensions. New scaling dimensions means new problems to solve that are not trivial.

by xapata 10y ago

elvinyung 10y ago

Amazon already has Aurora: https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/details/ https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/details/ You're right that there's literally nothing else out there that has tight synchronization using atomic clocks, though.

xapata 10y ago
And because of that, Aurora's multi-zone replicas are read-only. I just noticed Google says the cross-region feature is coming later in 2017. Amazon might be planning to announce a similar change for Aurora in the coming months.
user5994461 10y ago
Aurora is a toy compared to Spanner. Single region, limited backups and replication topologies, limited performances. There is yet to see if Spanner can achieve the expectations, if it does, it's a game changer.
- xapata 10y ago
  > achieve the expectations It has for Google internally. No reason why they can't share the service externally.
  - discodave 10y ago
    Actually, there are lots of reasons why it's hard to share a service externally. Making a service public means you have to deal with lots of new problems like billing, abuse, dealing with lots of small users instead of a few large ones, stronger backwards compatibility requirements and so-forth.
    - xapata 10y ago
      Yes, but those are orthogonal to the scaling issues that I presume user5994461 was thinking of.
      - discodave 10y ago
        That's kind of the point, when you make a service like Cloud Spanner public you create new scaling dimensions. New scaling dimensions means new problems to solve that are not trivial.