Operational guidelines

The Cloud SQL Service Level Agreement (SLA) excludes outages "caused by factors outside of Google’s reasonable control". This page describes some of the user-controlled configurations that can cause an outage for a Cloud SQL instance to be excluded.

Introduction

Cloud SQL strives to give you as much control over how your instance is configured as possible. This includes some configurations that increase the risk of instance downtime, depending on the load and other configuration parameters. If your instance becomes unhealthy, and Cloud SQL determines that it was out of compliance with the operational limits as described on this page, then the downtime period is not covered by (or does not count against) the Cloud SQL SLA.

This list of operational limits is presented to inform you which configurations present these risks, ways to avoid these configurations, and ways to mitigate the risks when the configuration is required for your business environment.

Excluded configurations

The excluded configurations fall into the following categories:

  • General configuration requirements
  • Database flag values
  • Resource constraints

General configuration requirements

Only Cloud SQL instances configured for high availability with at least one dedicated CPU are covered by the Cloud SQL SLA. Shared-core instances and single-zone instances are not covered by the SLA.

If the instance is configured and used in a way that causes the workload to overload the instance or the instance to experience a long recovery time, then the SLA does not apply.

We strongly advise you to set up alerts and monitoring in Cloud Monitoring.

Database flag values

Cloud SQL lets you configure your instance using database flags. Some of these flags can be set in ways that might compromise the stability of the instance or the durability of its data.

For a complete list of configurable flags and their defaults, see database flags.

Resource constraints

The following resource constraints must be avoided to retain SLA coverage:

  • Storage full: if your disk utilization is consistently high, and automatic storage increase is not enabled, your instance is not properly sized for your workload and may not be covered by the SLA.
  • CPU overloaded: if your CPU utilization is consistently high, your instance is not properly sized for your workload, and may not be covered by the SLA.
  • Memory overloaded: if your memory usage is consistently high, your instance is not properly sized for your workload, and may not be covered by the SLA.
For more information, refer to the General best practices.