Amazon RDS vs Google Cloud SQL

Likelihood to Recommend

If you're operating within the Amazon universe of cloud computing, it's almost a no-brainer to utilize [Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)]. RDS is well suited for probably a majority of applications that are candidates to host on a cloud computing platform as it reduces overall management and complexity of your system.However, if you're doing a lot of data exporting/importing using tools that write to/read from the disk on the server, you may have challenges integrating RDS, as you have no access to the underlying host.

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Verified User

Engineer in Engineering

Marketing and Advertising Company, 11-50 employees

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Google Cloud SQL was very easy to setup because our institution is already already invested in the Google Cloud Platform. If we had gone with Amazon or Azure, there would have been extra complexity and cost of getting established. The product is a great fit for organizations already invested in GCP. Google offers everything the others do, however third party vendor support is seriously lacking (aka the vendors refer you to other tools like AWS etc).

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Verified User

Manager in Information Technology

Higher Education Company, 51-200 employees

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Feature Rating Comparison

Amazon RDS

Google Cloud SQL

Automatic software patching

Database scalability

Automated backups

Database security provisions

Monitoring and metrics

Automatic host deployment

Pros

For engineers with experience managing databases, setup is simple. And for the uninitiated, the RDS console interface becomes intuitive with some practice.
Not having the maintain the underlying infrastructure is a great benefit of using RDS. Patching and backups can be scheduled from the console and from then on are pretty much automated.
Right-sizing the DB instance to perform optimally with an application can be a very simple procedure. If a DB instance is not struggling to keep up, the instance size can be scaled up with just a few clicks.
Baseline configurations are generally sane for most RDS instances. This allows novice developers and engineers to get the most out of the service without being a complete database administrator.

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Michael Jenkins

Senior Systems Reliability Engineer

The Walt Disney CompanyEntertainment, 10,001+ employees

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Easy setup - No host VM, no software installation or configuration required.
Day to day reliability - Not depending on host VM allows more uptime.
Long term reliability - Storage scaling, backups, and maintenance can be scheduled to occur automatically.

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Verified User

Manager in Information Technology

Restaurants Company, 501-1000 employees

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Cons

There should be a proper listing of all parameter groups alongside the instances that they are attached to. This would help to see which instances would be affected if a parameter group is changed.
RDS should allow SUPER privilege to the master user. A few advanced tasks(like getting a physical backup using MySQL Enterprise Backup) fail because SUPER privilege is not available for the master user.
A few parameters are not modifiable in the parameter groups and the access to the server filesystem is not given. This should not be the case because as an advanced user, you might want to understand things a little deeper.

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Alok Patwal

Software Developer

ezDIHealth, Wellness and Fitness, 201-500 employees

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There is some functionality you cannot do from the console, including, granting and restricting user privileges, among other database management capabilities.
It is not trivial to connect to spun up VMS. Currently, we use the Cloud SQL proxy to do so.

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Cameron Gable

Software Engineer

Serimmune Inc.Biotechnology, 11-50 employees

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Usability

Amazon RDS 8.7

Based on 5 answers

The vast majority of things you'd want to do in Amazon Relational Database Service are simple to accomplish and remarkably consistent across database engines. Pricing, scalability and monitoring are easy to configure. If I had one complaint, it's that database engine specific features are not well documented in AWS, requiring reading external documentation in order to use some database systems to the fullest. But for most use cases, the defaults available in AWS are simple, easy to use, and good enough.

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Verified User

Professional in Information Technology

Human Resources Company, 51-200 employees

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No score

No answers yet

No answers on this topic

Support Rating

Amazon RDS 8.9

Based on 25 answers

The product is fairly straight forward to use, and staff as well as knowledge base is pretty good for getting answers you may need. The product is a great, flexible alternative to adding to one's own in-house infrastructure. It's especially useful for environments that you aren't sure about the overall long term need. Amazon Relational Database Service is great for environments that once you determine the long term need, can be maintained by Amazon.

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Mike Narumiya

President, Principal

Klaxon IT SolutionsHospital & Health Care, 11-50 employees

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Google Cloud SQL 6.6

Based on 6 answers

I haven't used support for this product since I deployed my first instance. After running it for some years, the docs have always been enough to solve any problem I had encountered. But speaking about the vendor, Google Cloud support answered well and in an acceptable time to the few issues we needed to get assistance for.

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Leonel Quinteros

Director of Technology

Global Brigades, Inc.Philanthropy, 51-200 employees

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Alternatives Considered

Amazon Relational Database Service will probably give you everything you need from a traditional manual DB setup, except everything is managed for you. The only downside is having to pay the premium for the service; however, the trade-off of not having to deal with the intricacies involved with database administration, make it well worth it for most.

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Gabriel Samaroo

Senior Software Engineer

RocketripComputer Software, 11-50 employees

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The Google Cloud SQL offering fits into our development stack and was a clean replacement for our MySQL database. If we had been using SQL Server instead, then the offering from Azure would have made more sense. I have used both in the past and both work well, with GCP being a little less expensive.

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Verified User

C-Level Executive in Information Technology

Computer Software Company, 11-50 employees

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Return on Investment

Switching back to RDS from Redshift has made my BI Dashboards much more performant (though again, we're not dealing with data in the magnitudes that justify the Redshift toolset).
It has decreased our tech debt. Engineering has been much more straight forward.
Our uptime has been improved by removing unnecessary data migration processes.

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Kyle Reichelt

Senior Project Manager

OnMetricInternet, 11-50 employees

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Google Cloud SQL has reduced our operational costs by not having to manage our own instance of the MySQL server.
Since code and SQL instance are now decoupled, it was possible to scale where we had to.

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Bhargav Nanekalva

Senior PHP Full Stack Developer

CloudSEKInternet, 51-200 employees

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Pricing Details

General

Free Trial

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Free/Freemium Version

—

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

—

Entry-level set up fee?

Optional

Free to try. Pay only for what you use with no minimum fee.

Amazon RDS Editions & Modules

Edition

Amazon RDS for MySQL	$0.29 ($0.58)¹
Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL	$0.24 ($0.48)¹
Amazon RDS for MariaDB	$0.25 ($0.50)¹
Amazon RDS for Oracle	$0.482 ($0.964)¹
Amazon RDS for SQL Server	$1.02 ($1.52)¹

per hour, R5 Large (R5 Extra Large)

Additional Pricing Details

—

General

Free Trial

—

Free/Freemium Version

—

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

—

Entry-level set up fee?

No

Google Cloud SQL Editions & Modules

—

Additional Pricing Details

—

Rating Summary

Amazon RDS

Google Cloud SQL

Amazon RDS

Google Cloud SQL

Amazon RDS

Google Cloud SQL

Amazon RDS

Google Cloud SQL

Amazon RDS vs Google Cloud SQL

Amazon RDS

Google Cloud SQL

Feature Rating Comparison

Database-as-a-Service

Automatic software patching

Database scalability

Automated backups

Database security provisions

Monitoring and metrics

Automatic host deployment

Pros

Cons

Usability

Support Rating

Alternatives Considered

Return on Investment

Screenshots

Pricing Details

General

Free Trial

Free/Freemium Version

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

Entry-level set up fee?

Amazon RDS Editions & Modules

Edition

Additional Pricing Details

General

Free Trial

Free/Freemium Version

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

Entry-level set up fee?

Google Cloud SQL Editions & Modules

Additional Pricing Details

Rating Summary

Likelihood to Recommend

Likelihood to Renew

Usability

Support Rating

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