Google Unleashes Secret Weapon To End Amazon Cloud Supremacy, Will It Be Enough?

The tech world has been experiencing a quiet kind of turmoil for some time now, with companies vying for the top spot in the cloud computing industry. Right now, Amazon is wearing the crown, but Google is determined to knock it off its perch. By unleashing Spanner, the search engine company believe that this is now doable.

For those who aren’t aware, Spanner is an incredibly powerful technology that allows Google to maintain communication between servers all over the world in the most efficient manner possible. It basically removes time delays between data transfers, which means that all of Google’s servers are working under the same clock. This makes Spanner unique and the tech giant is betting on that to have an edge over its rivals, Wired reports.

As for whether or not this is going to be the case, it would seem that the cloud computing community is split on the issue. As Stanford University’s Peter Bailis notes, the sheer uniqueness of Spanner might be enough to make people actually want it for their business.

“If they offer it, people will want it, and people will use it,” he said.

On the other hand, there is also the fact that Spanner’s uniqueness is directly derived from the fact that Google’s need for it is also a unique case. The tech company needed the technology in order to coordinate its database, thus allowing users from any place across the globe to get the same results on whatever they search.

As a result, many are arguing that few other companies would have a need for this kind of technology. In response, Deepti Srivastava recently spoke to TechCrunch to explain exactly what users can do with Spanner as a cloud service.

“If you are struggling with the scale of your transactional database — you will go to a sharded database, or NoSQL,” Srivastava explained. “If you’re at that stage where you have to make those trade-offs, Spanner is the way to go. You are already doing work to use one of those systems. We try to make that trade-off as simple as possible.”