[manacit]

Aurora is a 'better MySQL mousetrap', IMO.

This is a globally-available, nearly-CAP-beating datastore that powers one of the biggest websites on the internet.

It's not quite apples and oranges, but this is definitely a different problem they are solving.

[abalone]

That's vague. AWS also powers huge websites and Amazon is recommending Aurora as the "default choice" for most workloads.[1] There are certainly significant architectural differences but I would say we can definitely make a direct practical comparison.

[1] http://www.computerworld.com/article/2953299/cloud-computing...

[cobookman]

If Aurora powers huge websites, spanner is for ginormous websites. Think a multiplier to netflix's database needs.

[dzhiurgis]

Curious to know what are Netflix's needs for relational database?

Doesn't strike me as a business with complex logic.

[threeseed]

Netflix mainly uses Cassandra as their database.

And their needs are reasonably complex. They use machine learning and big data analytics to generate the list of videos that you should be watching. In order for those to work they need to capture a whole raft of end user metrics e.g. at what point you paused video X.

[cobookman]

I'd assume they keep track of who watches what for their 'continue watching series...' pain.

Netflix was given as an example of scale. I guess for another example, spanner could be used to store every visa transaction