On March 31, 2021, Google Cloud announced the general availability of its Database Migration Service (DMS). It is a serverless tool to migrate MySQL and PostgreSQL databases to Cloud SQL. Later, Google will introduce support for Microsoft SQL Server.

DMS supports migration from both on-premises and other cloud platforms. It offers a unique migration technique that implements MySQL and PostGreSQL’s capabilities and improves fidelity, security, and reliability.

The service was out in November, and its listed customers since that time are Accenture, Comoto, DoiT, Ryde, and Samsung. One of the customers, Freedom Financial Network, used DMS to migrate and synchronize its MySQL databases in just 13 hours. The estimated downtime by the company for each application was 3—4 hours. However, the actual downtime from the database side was maximum of 10 minutes for every application.

“DMS had step-by-step instructions that helped us perform the migrations successfully, without any loss of data,” Christopher Testroet, Freedom Financial Network’s Principal Engineer, wrote in a blog post. “With DMS and Google Cloud’s help, we transformed our monolithic architecture to a microservices architecture, deployed on GKE and using the Cloud SQL Proxy in a sidecar container pattern, or the Go proxy library, to connect to Cloud SQL.”