Google Cloud has announced extended support for end-of-life (EOL) Cloud SQL MySQL and PostgreSQL versions, aiming to help users maintain database operations and plan upgrades more efficiently. Starting February 1, 2025, versions such as MySQL 5.6, 5.7 and PostgreSQL 9.6, 10, 11, and 12 will enter an extended support phase, allowing customers to continue using these versions beyond their standard support dates.
The extended support period provides critical security patches and bug fixes, ensuring that databases remain secure and operational without needing immediate upgrades. This additional support period will give organizations more time to transition to newer database versions without disrupting operations. The service is particularly beneficial for businesses that face compatibility issues or require more time to test and deploy updates.
A Google blog post states that extended support for a major version will be offered for three years when customers opt in. After this time, the major version will be marked as deprecated. Any Cloud SQL instance running a deprecated version will be automatically upgraded to a newer, supported, significant version. Any instance that cannot be safely upgraded to the newer version will be unsupported.
Customers can also opt out of extended support anytime by upgrading to a version under regular support. Cloud SQL offers several ways to upgrade to newer major versions, including in-place major version upgrades (MySQL, PostgreSQL) and migrating organizations' data to a newer version using a Database Migration Service (DMS) or export.
In addition, a GitHub project by Adam North and Ronald Bradford provides supplemental documentation, aggregates existing documentation, and summarizes important dates/deadlines to help create an actionable and successful plan when upgrading from MySQL 5.7 or PostgreSQL 11 to a newer version. They write:
Managed services, such as Amazon RDS or Google Cloud SQL, will offer grace periods to perform these upgrades, and in some situations offer extended support.
Moreover, earlier Google Cloud's competitor AWS announced that MySQL 5.7 and PostgreSQL 11 database instances running on Amazon Aurora and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) will be automatically enrolled into Amazon RDS Extended Support starting February 29, 2024.
Stano Bocinec, a software engineer at Redpanda, tweeted:
GCP learned from the AWS mentee how to motivate orgs to stop using old versions of their products and is now starting to offer extended (a.k.a expensive) support as well.
Furthermore, the MySQL and PostgreSQL versions of Azure Databases have support policies for MySQL versions 5.7 and 8.0 and PostgreSQL versions 9.6 and up.
Lastly, pricing details for extended support will be announced on the Cloud SQL pricing page and in the Cloud SQL release notes by August 15, 2024.
