How to run Google Cloud SQL only when I need it?

Question

Google Cloud SQL advertises that it\'s only $0.0150 per hour for the smallest machine type, and I\'m being charged for every hour, not just hours that I\'m connected. Is this b

Answer 1

This is not so much about the pool as it is about the nature of Cloud SQL. Unlike App Engine, Cloud SQL instances are always up. I learned this the hard way one Saturday morning when I'd been away from the project for a week. :)

There's no way to spin them down when they're not being used, unless you explicitly go stop the service.

There's no way to schedule a service stop, at least within the GCP SDK. You could alway write a cron job, or something like that, that runs a little gcloud sql instances patch [INSTANCE_NAME] --activation-policy NEVER command at, for example, 6pm local time, M-F. I was too lazy to do that, so I just set a calendar reminder for myself to shut down my instance at the end of my workday.

Here's the MySQL Instance start/stop/restart page for the current SDK's docs: https://cloud.google.com/sql/docs/mysql/start-stop-restart-instance

On an additional note, there is an ongoing 'Feature Request' in the GCP Platform to start/stop the Cloud SQL (2nd Gen), according to the traffic as well. You can also visit the link and provide your valuable suggestions/comments there as well.