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.
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.
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.
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.
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.