Google has finally opened up Cloud SQL after two years of limited preview.  Cloud SQL is a managed cloud-based database service.     The smallest instances of the service can support up to 500GB, twice the previous limitations.    Also included is multizone replication, backup, and encryption services.

Clearly, this is in response to AWS’s RDS that has been providing good value and performance for the last several years.     Also, Google needs big cloud wins to obtain more market creditability, and this is a great step.

I suspect that Google may have some better plays yet in the database-as-a-service space, considering that “Big G,” is pretty good at performance engineering which is everything to cloud-based database services.     As AWS locks up more of the infrastructure space, focusing on the data may be a good way to grab up more market share.

Google is in second or third place, in the IaaS space, depending on what marketing stats you’re reading.     However, they seem to be a big scary competitor to AWS, who worries more about Google than the other cloud players, according to ex-AWS employees.