Migrating your apps from MySQL to Spanner just got easier

Yesterday’s databases aren‘t sufficient for tomorrow’s applications, which need to deliver dynamic, AI-driven experiences at unpredictable scale and with zero downtime. To help, at Google Cloud Next 25, we announced new functionality, improved performance, and migration tooling to simplify modernizing database workloads from MySQL to Spanner, Google Cloud’s horizontally scalable, always-on operational database. 

MySQL simply wasn’t designed for today’s most pressing scaling and availability needs. Common fixes, like sharding or manual replication, are complex and risky—coming exactly at the time when the business can tolerate it least. Planning and executing scaling on self-managed databases typically require expensive after-market solutions, which can take months to architect and test, diverting development teams from more pressing user-facing features. And because of the overhead of scaling, organizations often provision for peak usage, even if that capacity remains unused most of the time. 

Tomorrow’s applications also need to do more than just transaction processing. New experiences like semantic discovery, collaborative recommendations, real-time fraud detection, and dynamic pricing, require different ways of storing and querying data.

Simpler live migrations from MySQL to Spanner

To help organizations struggling to grow and modernize their apps, Spanner provides a well-defined migration path to safely and easily move production workloads from MySQL with virtually no downtime. Once there, they can take advantage of Spanner’s hands-free reliability and rich graph, full-text search, and integrated AI capabilities. 

A key part of this is Spanner migration tool, which automates schema and data migration to support live cutovers, including consolidating petabyte-sized sharded MySQL databases in days, not months. Improved data movement templates provide increased throughput at significantly lower cost as well as new flexibility to transform data as it’s migrated, and updated built-in reverse replication synchronizes data back from Spanner to sharded MySQL instances to allow for near real-time failover in a disaster scenario. Finally, new Terraform configurations and CLI integration provide flexibility to customize implementations.

Improved latency with fewer code and query changes

To further reduce the cost and complexity of migrating application code and queries, we introduced a rich new set of relational capabilities in Spanner that map closely to MySQL. 

Repeatable read is the default isolation level in MySQL, balancing  performance and consistency. We’re excited to bring this flexibility to Spanner as well. New repeatable read isolation, now in preview, complements Spanner’s existing serializable isolation. It will be familiar to MySQL developers and gives them additional tools to significantly improve performance. In fact, most common workloads can see up to a 5x latency improvement compared to what was possible in Spanner previously. In addition, new auto_increment keys, SELECT…FOR UPDATE, and close to 80 new MySQL functions dramatically reduce the changes required to migrate an application to Spanner. 

“As our calendar sharing service gained popularity, demand grew steadily. At 55 million users, we hit Aurora MySQL’s scalability limits for both data volume and active connections. But scalability wasn’t the only issue. Our app teams spent too much time managing the database, leaving less for feature development. Fully managed Spanner solved this, significantly cutting costs and enabling future growth. Migrations are challenging, but with Google Cloud support and the Spanner migration tool, we completed it successfully with minimal downtime.” – Eiki Kanai, SRE Manager, TimeTree

A recent Total Economic Impact study from Forrester Consulting also found that Spanner provided a 132% ROI and $7.74M of total benefits over three years for a composite organization representative of interviewed customers. This comes largely from retiring self-managed databases and taking advantage of Spanner’s elastic scalability and built-in, hands-free, high availability operations. Forrester found that decreased disruptions from unplanned downtime and system maintenance with Spanner reduced time to onboard new apps and allowed development teams to address new opportunities without complex re-architecture projects or new capital expenditures.

Get started today

To learn more about how Spanner can take the stress out of your organization’s next growth milestone and set your development teams up for success, visit https://cloud.google.com/spanner. There, you’ll find reference architectures, examples of successful migrations, and a directory of qualified partners to help with a free assessment. Read up on how to run a successful migration from MySQL. Or try Spanner yourself today with a 90-day free trial and production instances starting around $65 USD/month.