Cloud SQL vs self-maintained database?

Question

What's the advantage of using Google's Cloud SQL offering versus installing/maintaining instances yourself?

It seems to me that most of the features they list can be implemented fairly trivially by experienced mysql admins. Am I wrong?

CLARIFICATION: I am not asking which product is better. I am trying to understand what features Cloud SQL adds on top of self-hosted MySQL installations.

Answer 1

You can look at these types of questions from several angles: money, maintenance effort and quality of service.

Money-wise there is probably not that much of a difference, although it would not hurt to make the calculations for your usage scenario just to be sure.

In terms of maintenance-effort you are probably better of with using the Cloud SQL since most mundane tasks (such as creating back-ups and upgrading versions) are already handled for you.

Depending on your context, the quality of service of a 'hand-maintained' instance might be good enough, but if you need to support multiple sites then it quickly becomes a nuisance to create proper replications across the world (which from the looks of it is a standard feature of Cloud SQL).

Overall I would say it is greatly a matter of convenience.