Google continues to work on its cloud services, unveiling On Thursday enhancements to Cloud SQL, a version of the MySQL database running on Google’s infrastructure. The updated service gives users up to 100GB of storage — a 10x increase from the previous 10GB limit. Further, each database instance is now able to cache up to 16GB of RAM. That’s four times the previous 4GB limit and will mean faster database reads, according to a Google Enterprise blog post.
The enhancements — which also include an asynchronous replication option to speed up database writes — are another indication that Google is taking its non-search-related infrastructure business seriously. Amazon Web Services, the king of public cloud services, certainly appears to think so. Amazon cut the price of its Relational Database Service (RDS) earlier this week, and recently sued a former AWS exec for joining Google to work on the competitive Google Compute Engine.
Google launched a limited preview beta of Cloud SQL in October 2011. Last June, it unveiled price plans for the service, which executives said was the most-requested feature in Google App Engine. Now, the company is offering a limited-time free trial of the product for those wanting to kick the tires. The six-month trial gives users access to one Cloud SQL instance with limited RAM, .5GB of database storage, and enough network and IOPs to run the instance with “reasonable performance,” according to the Cloud SQL pricing site.
Cloud SQL customers can now also opt to run their database instances in U.S. or European data centers — another first.
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