[daj40]

The updates take the entire instance down for 2-5 minutes each month. While you can't avoid them, they can be scheduled for particularly low traffic times. If you're trying to avoid downtime, its a giant PIA. Even with HA enabled, you still lose master, slave and read replicas. Not entirely sure what they define HA as, but a mandatory monthly downtime doesn't usually fit into mine.

[Update] That said, from what I understand, they have a road map to maintaining read replicas and queued writes. Not sure what the date on it is though.

[flamingcow]

[I'm the Cloud SQL TL] I can't comment on timelines, but we're aware that customers are interested in more features around maintenance window scheduling, deferral, and notification, as well as shorter downtime for updates and smarter scheduling within a group of replicas.

[andydd]

Can you confirm that it's impossible to avoid downtime, even with HA, because of forced updates?

Surely that's what HA is? no downtime as you update each node one at a time?

If it's impossible then it's a dealbreaker.

[flamingcow]

[I'm the Cloud SQL TL] Confirmed. We know it's a problem that we need to fix. HA reduces downtime in unexpected failure cases (live migration for your primary only helps in planned shutdown cases, not if the physical machine fails), but doesn't currently help with maintenance-related downtime.

[ngrilly]

What's the point of HA if there is a still a maintenance downtime?