
Next generation of Google Cloud SQL - aarkay
http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/2015/12/the-next-generation-of-managed-MySQL-offerings-on-Cloud-SQL.html
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sunsu
Still no Postgres :(

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vdaniuk
I've been considerably dissatisfied with AWS lately, namely their lack of real
customer support for billing issues and was shopping around for a Postgres
provider. [http://databaselabs.io](http://databaselabs.io) seems to be a good
choice if you're looking for AWS alternative.

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halite
When it comes to support, Google isn't doing anything exceptional either.

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dmytton
I wonder if you've actually submitted a ticket to Google Cloud support at all?
At the Gold level of $400/m I've had excellent experiences including:

a) First responders actually being engineers who know the code well, can
reference the open source repositories pointing to where issues are and
suggesting workarounds.

b) Full workarounds being coded by the first responder (in Python for our use
but they officially support other languages too) which are simple drop in
replacement to fix the problem temporarily until the root cause is addressed.

c) Fast troubleshooting of critical issues (within minutes) with helpful
debugging advice to resolve the issue.

d) A single contact owning the issue by default, with handover to alternative
timezones on requst e.g. when an issue is long running or (in my case) you
were in one location for a few weeks then change to another.

e) Consistently achieving the above over 1+ years worth of tickets, including
responses handled from Google support teams worldwide to fit into the timezone
e.g. Tokyo based support answering questions UK time Sunday night (Monday in
Tokyo).

f) The same level of support offered for alpha and beta products even though
the official word is "best effort/no SLA"

Where it has been more frustrating is with bugs discovered in the products.
These have tended to be escalated to the engineering teams which take a while
to fix the root cause, although acceptable workarounds are provided in the
meantime. Their support ticket UI is also pretty rubbish.

Google might have a poor reputation for support when you're a consumer, but
then you're not paying them anything. For both Google Cloud and Google Apps,
their support has been excellent.

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halite
> At the Gold level of $400/m I've had excellent experiences.

This is what's different. Yes I've submitted tickets. I did for SSL
certificates related issues as they are currently migrating that functionality
from google apps to developer console. I also emailed them about some issues I
had with storage but nothing. Eventually I found workarounds but I guess I
don't pay for support so I shouldn't be expecting it.

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dudus
Not sure how well the second gen supports appengine. With 1st gen you could
ask the database to follow an appengine app so they are both in the same cell.
I also don't see how to allow connection from appengine apps I only can select
IP addresses. Are these unnecessary now?

Also curious about the on demand option. I had it in 1st gen but its gone now.
I can only select Always on or Never. I had a large database that I only used
for a few hours per month. I'd love to migrate to second gen but if its always
in it might make it much more expensive.

At last I tried to perform an export from 1st gen into 2nd gen and I'm getting
server errors will try again later.

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Lewisham
I'd love to hear about the errors you're experiencing; if there's any bumps in
the road we want to smooth them out ASAP.

Please email cloud-sql@google.com with your instance names and the error
message, and I'll get someone to look into it for you.

Second Gen is indeed always on. Crunch the numbers for your use case, I've
been told by the pricing mavens that for many use cases Second Gen ends up
cheaper. And yeah, Second Gen doesn't follow your AppEngine app the way it
used to. This will be a call you need to make based on your use case. If you
are low-traffic and highly latency-bound and your app runs on App Engine,
first gen may ( _may_ ) be quicker. For other bounds (I/O, RAM, CPU) you
should expect better performance from Second Gen.

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obulpathi
Looks like its neck to neck with AWS RDS MySQL. Has anyone done any benchmarks
on performance?

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stonewhite
It is more comparable with AWS Aurora, since this is a compatible
reimplementation and _not_ a MySQL box with beefed up hardware specs.

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Lewisham
Hey, I'm a software engineer on Cloud SQL.

Cloud SQL isn't a compatible reimplementation, it's the same vanilla MySQL
that you know and love, but with a few tweaks (such as removal of SUPER
privileges so you can't bork your backups, which is rather important as a
managed service).

Second Generation instances should have better uptime than First Generation,
as we now have live migration ala GCE if the host machine requires
maintenance, and we can upgrade much of the infrastructure without restarting
MySQL as we used to.

We do have failover capabilities for Second Generation instances if a zone
goes down, so we're hoping between failover between zones and host migration
we should have some really good uptime.

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brianwawok
Awesome, thanks!

Any idea on how long a failover takes? Seems to be about 30 seconds for First
generation cloud SQL, is it the same-ish for 2nd generation?

Only thing I don't love about the Cloud SQL is the failover time, but I guess
if it stays at 30 seconds and doesn't fail too much - it is still way better
than trying to run my own SQL server.

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Lewisham
So that depends on what's happening.

If it's host maintenance (the machine your database is on needs to be brought
down) then you should "see" the same results as Google Compute Engine live
migration, which is that you hopefully see nothing :) This was one of the most
common reasons a first gen instance would require restarting, alongside us
pushing updates. So nixing that one, alongside the other non-restarting
updates we can do now, is good stuff.

If a whole zone goes down, we start the failover process automatically for
you. This is order minutes. It won't be seamless, but zones going down is
hopefully a very rare occurrence.

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brianwawok
ya that makes sense, sounds pretty good.

I have a small product on a gen1 D1 with 512 mb ram. I wonder how that
compares to a db-g1-small in performance. db-g1-small has more memory but not
sure if it is as apples to apples as that..

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simonmorley
And still no private IPs?

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coleca
It's also a shame you can't use their own firewall rules with CloudSQL, or
even specify instance tags to allow traffic inbound to CloudSQL. You have to
specify IP ranges (CIDR) for each of your hosts. Makes it near impossible to
allow an auto-scaling group to access CloudSQL since you have no control over
the public IP that will be assigned to a new host being spun up in the ASG.

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Beldur
It seems they approached the problem with a new solution:
[https://cloud.google.com/sql/docs/sql-
proxy](https://cloud.google.com/sql/docs/sql-proxy)

,,The Cloud SQL Proxy provides secure access to your Cloud SQL Second
Generation instances. ... It is especially useful when connecting from clients
with dynamic IP address, such as Managed VM and Google Container Engine
applications."

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simonmorley
The proxy solution looks OK, shame it wasn't mentioned in the blog unless I'm
blind.

Lack of private IPs has been the single reason why we've not moved our current
dbs over. I'm sure it's hard but you're Google after all o_0

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gtaylor
Pretty much the same situation for us, too.

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slatkovi
I was really excited about the possibility of using Cloud SQL. Unfortunately,
the lack of private IP whitelisting forces you to make some tradeoffs that
don't make sense from the security perspective.

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dubcanada
Is it just me or does Google Cloud SQL seem extremely expensive compared to
the alternatives (RDS, etc)?

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timdorr
It's just you.

Looking at Amazon's m4 instances vs Google's standard instances.

    
    
       n1-standard-2=$0.1930  db.m4.large=$0.175
       n1-standard-4=$0.3860  db.m4.xlarge=$0.35
       n1-standard-8=$0.7720  db.m4.2xlarge=$0.70
       n1-standard-16=$1.5445 db.m4.4xlarge=$1.401
    

That's without Google's sustained use discount, so it comes out as cheaper
most of the time.

