Google’s Cloud SQL Hits General Availability, Gets An SLA, Encryption And Support For Larger Databases

After two-and-a-half years in preview, Google’s Cloud SQL, the company’s fully managed MySQL database service, has now hit general availability.

As with most Google services that hit this milestone, Cloud SQL now features an SLA, which guarantees 99.95 percent availability for the service. Google will consider a minute of 20 percent connection failure as downtime, which is pretty generous.

In addition, the service will now automatically encrypt all customer data, so everything stored on Cloud SQL is automatically encrypted (though backup encryption is still listed as “coming soon”). In addition, all CloudSQL traffic on Google’s network is encrypted and external connection can also be secured with SSL.

By default, even the smallest instances can now handle up to 500GB of data (the limit was previously 250GB), which Google says is replicated multiple times in multiple zones and automatically backed up as part of the price of the service. Whether you want a very basic Cloud SQL machine with just 0.125GB of RAM to handle 500GB of data, though, is a different question.

Pricing for Cloud SQL starts at $0.025 per hour for on-demand machines without taking into account storage and networking costs. The smallest package – which many users will likely opt for – starts at $0.36 per day and includes 0.125GB of RAM, 0.5GB of storage and 200,000 I/O operations. A high-end instance with 16GB of RAM and 10GB of storage and a far more generous 32 million I/O operations will set you back $46.84 per day.

Amazon’s comparable RDS for SQL Server service starts at $0.024 for on-demand access.

Besides Cloud SQL, Google also offers BigQuery for working with very large datasets, as well as the Google Cloud Datastore (which is still in preview) for developers who want to use a NoSQL database on its Cloud Platform. The Cloud Datastore launched at Google I/O 2013, so if Cloud SQL is any indication, it will remain in preview for a while longer.