Prevent planned downtime during the holiday shopping season with Cloud SQL from Cloud Blog

Routine database maintenance is a way of life. Updates keep your business running smoothly and securely. And with a managed service, like Cloud SQL, your databases automatically receive the latest patches and updates, with significantly less downtime. But we get it: Nobody likes downtime, no matter how brief. 

That's why we’re pleased to announce that Cloud SQL, our fully managed database service for MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQL Server, now gives you more control over when your instances undergo routine maintenance.

Cloud SQL is introducing maintenance deny period controls. With maintenance deny periods, you can prevent automatic maintenance from occurring during a 90-day time period. 

This can be especially useful for the Cloud SQL retail customers about to kick off their busiest time of year, with Black Friday and Cyber Monday just around the corner. This holiday shopping season is a time of peak load that requires heightened focus on infrastructure stability, and any upgrades can put that at risk.

By setting a maintenance deny period from mid-October to mid-January, these businesses can prevent planned upgrades from Cloud SQL during this critical time.

Understanding Cloud SQL maintenance
Before describing these new controls, let’s answer a few questions we often hear about the automatic maintenance that Cloud SQL performs.

What is automatic maintenance?
To keep your databases stable and secure, Cloud SQL automatically patches and updates your database instance (MySQL, Postgres, and SQL Server), including the underlying operating system. To perform maintenance, Cloud SQL must temporarily take your instances offline.

What is a maintenance window?
Maintenance windows allow you to control when maintenance occurs. Cloud SQL offers maintenance windows to minimize the impact of planned maintenance downtime to your applications and your business. 

Defining the maintenance window lets you set the hour and day when an update occurs, such as only when database activity is low (for example, on Saturday at midnight). 

Additionally, you can control the order of updates for your instance relative to other instances in the same project (“Earlier” or “Later”). Earlier timing is useful for test instances, allowing you to see the effects of an update before it reaches your production instances. 

What are the new maintenance deny period controls?
You can now set a single deny period, configurable from 1 to 90 days, each year. During the deny period, Cloud SQL will not perform maintenance that causes downtime on your database instance.

Deny periods can be set to reduce the likelihood of downtime during the busy holiday season, your next product launch, end of quarter financial reporting, or any other important time for your business.

Paired with Cloud SQL’s existing maintenance notification and rescheduling functionality, deny periods give you even more flexibility and control. After receiving a notification of upcoming maintenance, you can reschedule ad hoc, or if you want to prevent maintenance longer, set a deny period. 

Getting started with Cloud SQL’s new maintenance control
Review our documentation to learn more about maintenance deny periods and, when you're ready, start configuring them for your database instances. 

What’s next for Cloud SQL
Support for additional maintenance controls continues to be a top request from users. These new deny periods are an addition to the list of existing maintenance controls for Cloud SQL. Have more ideas? Let us know what other features and capabilities you need with our Issue Tracker and by joining the Cloud SQL discussion group. We’re glad you’re along for the ride, and we look forward to your feedback!