Google Cloud SQL Finally Goes Live
After releasing a limited preview over 24 months ago, Google has finally released a full version of its much anticipated Cloud SQL product. Just like any other Google release, Cloud SQL is feature rich and fully documented. Google insists that this isn’t just a simple database system. Google Cloud SQL looks to compete will other large, full-featured SQL apps currently available in the cloud.
This feature rich service allows for databases to be up to 500GBs in size. Organizations can also enable multizone replication, autonomous data backup while encrypting the data on both ends of the transaction. This product will compete directly with Amazon’s RDS offerings. Google and Amazon have priced their database services at about the same price. The price is set to start at 2.5 cents per hour for the lowest tier of service.
Google’s Cloud SQL product is heavily documented and the service offers a service level agreement which will put any IT decision maker at ease. The FAQ’s on Google’s Cloud SQL website says that the service guarantees 99.95% or better uptime per month. If the monthly uptime falls between 99.00 and 99.95%, the client is entitled to a 10% credit that can be applied to future invoices. The SLA goes on to say that uptime between 95.00% and 99.00% is eligible for a 25% future account credit and uptime below 95% is eligible for a 50% account credit. The FAQ page at Google goes into much more detail however this is the general overview of the service.
Many experts were happy to see that Google decided to use the MySQL 5.5 database engine for this roll out. While 5.6 is currently available, industry experts say that 5.5 will continue to be the more trusted release while more research and development is still being done within the 5.6 environment. Google may migrate to 5.6 in the future but the current strategy is to stick with 5.5 for the Google Cloud SQL product.
