Amazon Aurora vs Google Cloud Spanner
Amazon Aurora
aws.amazon.com
Google Cloud Spanner
cloud.google.comSide by side
| Figure | Amazon Aurora | Google Cloud Spanner |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | — |
| Free plan | Yes | — |
| Free trial | — | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | — | Yes |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 4 | 7 |
| Spec score · Databases And Backend | 8.1 (#14) | 8.1 (#16) |
| Spec score · Distributed SQL Databases | 8.1 (#12) | 8.3 (#10) |
| Spec score · Database Software | 8.1 (#41) | 8.4 (#32) |
| Spec score · Transaction Data Store Software | 8.1 (#17) | 8.1 (#18) |
| Availability | AWS says Aurora is designed for up to 99.99% single-Region and 99.999% multi-Region availability. | Google says Spanner delivers up to 99.999% availability and offers single-region, dual-region, and multi-region configurations. |
| Compliance | AWS lists Aurora in compliance programs that include SOC, PCI, FedRAMP, and HIPAA. | Google lists ISO 27001, SOC 2, and HIPAA among Spanner’s certifications and compliance credentials. |
| Free plan | No | No |
| Integrations | Aurora MySQL can invoke AWS Lambda functions and load data from or save data to Amazon S3. | Google documents integrations with Cloud Run, Dataflow, Cloud Storage, Compute Engine, GKE, Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, and Looker. |
| Scaling | Aurora Serverless automatically starts, stops, and scales capacity based on application needs, and charges for capacity consumed. | Spanner provides horizontal read and write scalability, automatic database sharding, and geo-partitioning. |
| Security | Aurora supports encryption at rest using AWS KMS keys and uses SSL (AES-256) to secure data in transit. | Spanner provides encryption in transit, identity and access controls, and security controls under a shared responsibility model. |
| Support | Customers with an active AWS Premium Support plan can contact AWS for Aurora-specific troubleshooting and guidance. | Google lists support packages, Stack Overflow, online help communities, and bug or feature requests as support options for Spanner instances. |
Plans
Amazon Aurora
- Free planFree
- Paid planPrice not published
- Aurora PostgreSQL Serverless Free planFree
- Aurora PostgreSQL and Aurora MySQL On-DemandPrice not published
Google Cloud Spanner
- StandardPrice not published
- EnterprisePrice not published
- Enterprise PlusPrice not published
- Spanner free trial instanceFree
- Standard edition compute$0.03 a month
- Enterprise edition compute$0.04 a month
- Enterprise Plus edition compute$0.06 a month
In their own words
Amazon Aurora
Amazon Aurora has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.
Google Cloud Spanner
Google Cloud Spanner is a paid database service combining relational, graph, key-value, and search capabilities. It provides Strong-ACID transactions ordered with TrueTime, horizontal read and write scaling, automatic sharding, and geo-partitioning. Configurations include single-region, dual-region, and multi-region deployments, with Google describing availability up to 99.999%. Spanner Graph, vector search, and built-in full-text search are included. A columnar engine supports ad hoc analytics on live data, and BigQuery integration enables federated queries. Spanner Omni is downloadable for on-premises, cross-cloud, or laptop deployment. Client libraries cover C++, C#, Go, Java, Node.js, PHP, Python, and Ruby. Integrations include Cloud Run, Dataflow, Cloud Storage, Compute Engine, GKE, Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, and Looker. Security includes encryption in transit and identity and access controls. PostgreSQL compatibility, horizontal scaling, multi-region deployment, geo-partitioning, and HTAP workloads are listed.