Google Cloud SQL Read replica's in other regions

Question

We are currently investigating the options to make a partly switch to Google Cloud SQL. What we are searching for is a setup by which data is available for reading in multiple regions to increase the speed of the web-application. Writing from multiple regions would off course be great, but that's not really something MySQL does when you also want to have speed on your side :-)

What we would like to setup is a master-slave setup through which the Master would be in Europe and slaves (for reading) would be available in the US and Asia. This way we can provide information to our customers from a VM + SQL instance in Asia without having to connect to a database in Europe.

As far as I am aware it is not possible to currently add a read-instance outside of the region of the master. Is that correct?

Or, would it be possible to create our own MySQL read-only instance and let it replicate from a Google Cloud SQL instance? This would not be preferable (database administration, server administration) but is off course an option.

Answer 1

You can do cross-region replication in Cloud SQL, although it is not straight forward because the performance will not be great. You have to create a master in Cloud SQL, then create a replica with external master pointing at the master you created: https://cloud.google.com/sql/docs/replication#external-master

You can go in the other direction as well: https://cloud.google.com/sql/docs/replication#replication-external

These features are only supported for first generation of Cloud SQL.