Google’s Cloud Platform has long featured Cloud SQL, a zero-maintenance MySQL database that’s hosted on Google’s cloud platform. What it didn’t offer was an API to easily manage these databases without having to use Google’s admin interface. Today, however, Google is launching the Cloud SQL API. This new REST API will allow developers to programmatically manage their database instances and open a number of new use cases for Cloud SQL.
The API, which Google still deems to be experimental, will allow developers to create their own workflows to easily create and delete instances, restart them and restore them from backup. They will also be able to use it to important and export their databases to and from Google Cloud Storage.
For developers, this means using Google’s cloud database is now quite a bit easier, especially if they need to regularly manage multiple databases for their customers.
Google’s launch partner for this API is OrangeScape, which uses it to power parts of KiSSFLOW, its Google Apps workflow SaaS service. With KiSSFLOW, OrangeScape’s CTO Mani Doraisamy said in a statement today, “we manage Cloud SQL instances and App Engine instances individually for each of our customers. [..] We could not provision the database every time a new customer came in. With the Cloud SQL API, we were able to provision it and not have costs or manual intervention associated with it from offsite.”
With its Cloud Datastore, by the way, Google also recently launched a new database option for developers who need a powerful NoSQL solution. Cloud Datastore also currently offers a basic API for managing some aspects of the service, though it’s not quite as comprehensive as the API Google launched for Cloud SQL today.