Google Cloud SQL Reviews & Insights

Our clients need a database solution for their e-commerce tools. They usually used a dedicated virtual machine with a traditional DBMS, but this would cost too much to maintain. Using a cloud solution like Google Cloud SQL would be a better solution in this case, avoiding unnecessary infrastructure maintenance costs.

In our experience, Google Cloud SQL is useful for applications that need a relational database but are not very intensive in data processing and/or don't have heavy loads of data write and read. In these scenarios, it proves to be less expensive and easier to maintain than a traditional DBMS. On the other hand, for really database-intensive applications, it can become too costly and too complicated to maintain.

We use Google Cloud SQL as our primary production Postgres database, as well as our development/staging database. We love it because of its autoscaling features, automated backups, and excellent security. We primarily connect to the database via our Google Cloud Run instance, and it's all securely tied down in a VPC. It also serves well as a development/staging database - we just turn off some of the more premium features like autoscaling.

Google Cloud SQL works perfectly as a production database - it's really got all the features you'd want to have good production-related practices and it stays affordable via autoscaling. It probably would be overkill as a development/staging database, but it's also nice to reuse the same configuration between them.