Google Cloud → AWS and Azure
AWS and Azure equivalents of Spanner
The closest AWS equivalents of Google Cloud Spanner are Amazon Aurora Serverless v2, Amazon Aurora DSQL, Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL Limitless Database and Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra); on Azure, Azure SQL Database serverless, SQL database in Microsoft Fabric, Azure Database for PostgreSQL elastic clusters, Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL, Azure Cosmos DB for Apache Cassandra and Azure Managed Instance for Apache Cassandra.
About Spanner
| Provider | Google Cloud |
|---|---|
| Status | Generally available |
| What it is | Globally distributed, strongly consistent relational database with GoogleSQL and PostgreSQL dialects, up to 99.999% availability, and compute measured in processing units or nodes. |
| Documentation | docs.cloud.google.com |
| Pricing | Official pricing page |
Mappings (4)
Serverless relational database (autoscale and pause) Partial match
Aurora Serverless v2 has no direct counterpart. Spanner with its managed autoscaler adjusts compute capacity automatically, but it doesn't pause to zero, and Cloud SQL instances don't autoscale compute.
- Spanner compute is measured in processing units and can be very small, but there is always a minimum capacity.
- Spanner is a different engine (GoogleSQL or PostgreSQL dialect), not a drop-in MySQL/PostgreSQL.
Serverless, active-active distributed SQL Partial match
Aurora DSQL maps partly to Spanner, a globally distributed, strongly consistent relational database with multi-region configurations and up to 99.999% availability.
- Spanner is provisioned in compute capacity (with optional autoscaling); DSQL is serverless and billed per use.
- Spanner offers a PostgreSQL dialect but is not wire-compatible PostgreSQL for every feature.
Horizontally sharded PostgreSQL Partial match
Aurora PostgreSQL Limitless maps partly to Spanner with its PostgreSQL interface, which scales horizontally without manual sharding.
- Spanner's PostgreSQL interface supports PostgreSQL syntax and clients but is not PostgreSQL itself; extensions and some features differ.
Apache Cassandra-compatible wide-column database Partial match
Amazon Keyspaces maps partly to Bigtable (wide-column, HBase-compatible) and to Spanner's Cassandra Adapter, which lets Cassandra clients use Spanner.
- Bigtable isn't CQL-compatible; data models and queries need rework.
- The Spanner Cassandra Adapter keeps CQL clients but runs on Spanner's engine.