Google released Cloud SQL in limited preview back in 2011, and has only just now launched general availability.

It was first conceived of as an add-on to Google App Engine, but Google has since launched Compute Engine, and it works as a “database backbone” for apps running on either.

With general availability, Cloud SQL gets encryption of customer data, a 99.95% uptime SLA, and support for databases up to 500GB in size.

Cloud SQL instances can store that amount, with the smallest D0 instance costing $0.025 per hour up, and on the other end of the spectrum, D32 with 16GB of RAM costing $46.84 per day.

“Your data is replicated multiple times in multiple zones and automatically backed up, all included in the price of the service,” says Google Cloud product manager Joe Faith. “And you only pay for the storage that you actually use, so you don’t need to reserve this storage in advance.”

“Replicated storage means we can guarantee 99.95% availability of the service,” he adds. “And because even a reduced service is not acceptable for many applications, we have set a high bar for availability: for example, we regard a single minute of just 20% connection failure as a downtime.”

Google says Cloud SQL has already seen “great” developer traction with customers including Costco, LiveHive, Ocado and LiveStream.

Last year, Google launched the Cloud SQL API.

Image via Google