GCP – Introducing cross-region replica for Cloud SQL

Being responsible for business continuity isn’t easy. You must consider a wide variety of failure scenarios, including the outage of a Google region. In the event of a regional outage, you want your application and database to quickly start serving your customers in another available region if a Google Cloud region fails.

We’ve worked closely with Cloud SQL customers facing business continuity challenges to simplify the experience, and we are excited to launch Cloud SQL cross-region replication, which is available for MySQL and PostgreSQL database engines. 

What is a cross-region replica for Cloud SQL?

Cross-region replica makes it easy to create a fully managed read replica in a different region than that of the primary instance. You can create a replica in any Google Cloud region.

We’ve heard from Major League Baseball (MLB) that cross-region replicas have been useful. “We store all our important tracking information such as location of player, pitch velocity, and even the wind data on Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL,” says Greg Cain, MLB vice president, Baseball Data. We take great pride as the national pastime with millions of fans across the U.S., but we also have a large fanbase beyond that which spans all seven continents around the world. Our global audiences enjoy watching games at all times of day on MLB.com and our different consumer products. Cross-region replication was a very critical feature for us to implement to provide uninterrupted services to our fans.”

Using Cloud SQL cross-region replicas

With cross-region replica, you can: 

1. Minimize recovery point objective (RPO): A cross-region replica is a copy of the primary that reflects changes to the primary instance in almost real time, so data loss is very small in the event of a Google Cloud region failure. 

2. Minimize recovery time objective (RTO): Cross-region replica maintains an online copy of your data in another region. In the event of Google Cloud region failure, a replica can be promoted within minutes.

3. Make globally distributed applications faster: Read replicas are closer to their application in another region.

4. Migrate data between regions: Use cross-region replicas to minimize downtime when moving data between regions.

Simple and secure, by default

Cloud SQL cross-region replication reduces operational overhead and is fully integrated with Google Cloud’s Cloud SQL security and privacy features.

• Fully managed 

• Easily set up, maintain, manage, and administer replicas in any region on Google Cloud.

• Google Cloud networking

• Creating a cross-region replica requires no networking setup. Global VPC uses private IP for replication traffic between regions—eliminating the need of complex VPN and VPC configuration, which would be otherwise needed to set up cross-region networking.

• Cross-region replication traffic uses reliable, high-performing, and scalable Google Cloud networking.

• Network monitoring, verification, and optimization is simplified using proactive network operations with Network Intelligence Center.

• Cloud SQL security and privacy 

• Data at rest in replicas is encrypted using customer-managed encryption keys (CMEK).

• Cross-region replication traffic remains private, without access to and from the public internet, when a private IP option is used.

• Cross-region replicas are supported as part of Access Transparency, which represents Google’s long-term commitment to security and transparency by providing you with logs that capture the actions Google personnel take when accessing your content. 

• Connection org policy control provides centralized control of the public IP settings of Cloud SQL to reduce the security attack surface of Cloud SQL instances from the internet.

• Cloud SQL will enforce the data residency policy you define. Replicas can only be created in permitted regions.

Getting started with cross-region replica

Creating a cross-region replica is as simple as creating a read replica.

Get started with cross-region replication today.