This was a tough call for the team: ship now for the folks that are okay with that, or wait until it's fully baked. They chose the former, which certainly means it's not a great idea for serious production load, but that's also true of it simply being in Beta. You won't see it go GA before it's really ready for production work (including replication, backups and so on) but I think it was a reasonable choice to get people started.
Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud (but not Cloud SQL).
I realize you can't commit to any particular dates, but is your feeling that this is .... single digit months away, or multiple digit months away, from being out of 'beta'?
Good question! Because of those important bits of functionality that will keep rolling in during the Beta, I'd say single digit months to the most important ones.
As a point of clarification though Beta => GA is about production hardening. Products can't go to GA without demonstrating that they've met their SLOs continuously for several weeks. Products can take longer than that if they feel they should make more tweaks first (and pgsql certainly qualifies), but we want to both ship quickly and get out of the reputation for perpetual Beta.
It's a great idea. Customers can start using it today to host the databases for their dev and QA environments, which will help suss out any issues with it before GA.
Seems like there is some confusion going on about the Free tier on a post[1]. Can you please comment there on whether the 'Always free' is free only during the first 12 months or forever?
Also, if I have been using Google Cloud since before today (when free trial was $300 over 60 days), am I still eligible for the 'Always free' tier?
From the page linked and the FAQ, it looks like it but many people on the thread I've linked are thinking otherwise.
Sorry, we've made updates to clarify. Yes, you can use during and beyond the free trial. Even though your free trial has expired, you can still use the Always Free products.
Another quick question. Is there anyway to see during instance creation/usage if it is part of the free tier?
When I create a f1-micro instance, it shows the usual $5/month billing, but doesn't indicate any kind of 'free tier' usage. How can we know if any service we use will be a part of the free tier for sure? I guess I can wait a few days to see if any costs accrue, but I was wondering if there was a better way for everyone.
Is there a way to see if the Cloud SQL team is planning to add more extensions? I'm mostly interested in citext myself but seeing that many people mentioned extensions, it would be nice to have some visibility in that.
More extensions is something we definitely plan to do.
No timeline, partially because we don't know ourselves. Our main priority for next few weeks will be ensuring everything is nice and stable. Once we are confident in current feature set we will start adding more.
You can watch https://cloud.google.com/sql/docs/postgres/release-notes for news.
Regarding being beta, the flexible environment instances for App Engine are/were beta (I swear it was just a couple days ago, it was labelled beta, but not seeing it now). All the same, a lot of people are building towards that (ie Docker).
Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud (but not Cloud SQL).