Google Cloud SQL Pricing

Question

I am an avid user of Amazon AWS but I am not sure about the RDS as compared to Google's Cloud SQL. In this site - it is mentioned that Per Use Billing Plan exists.

How is that calculated? It is mentioned 'charged for periods of continuous use, rounded up to the nearest hour'.

How does it go? If there are no visitors to my site there are no charges, right? What if I say I have 100 continuous users for 30 days. Will I still be billed $0.025 per hour (excluding the network usage charges)?

How do I upload my present SQL database to Google Cloud service? Is it the same way as Amazon using Oracle Workbench?

Thank you

Answer 1

Using the per use billing, if your database isn't access for 15 minutes then it is taken offline and you are only charged for data storage ($0.24 per GB per month). Its brought back online the next time it's accessed, which typically takes around a second for a D1 instance. The number of users doesn't affect the charge: you are charged for the database instance, not the user.

More details here https://developers.google.com/cloud-sql/faq#how_usage_calculated

More information on importing data here: https://developers.google.com/cloud-sql/docs/import-export

Answer 2

For Google Cloud SQL, I think we need to differentiate the MySQL 1st generation and the 2nd generation. In this FAQ link (answered by Joe Faith), https://developers.google.com/cloud-sql/faq#how_usage_calculated, it is about the 1st generation with activation policy of ON_DEMAND, meaning that you are charged per minute of usage.

However, with MySQL 2nd generation (as answered by Se Song), it will charge you entirely every minute (24 h per day) regardless whether you have active connections or not. The reason is that it uses the instance with activation policy = ALWAYS. You can read more the pricing details in here: https://cloud.google.com/sql/pricing/#2nd-gen-pricing

Answer 3

You can manually stop and restart your database instance, and hence it could be possible to write a script that activates it under particular circumstances, but this is not provided within GCP's features.

Watch the default settings carefully or you risk $350/month fees. Here's my experience: https://medium.com/@the-bumbling-developer/can-you-use-google-cloud-platform-gcp-cheaply-and-safely-86284e04b332