Accelerate Business Transformation with Confluent’s Cloud SQL Google Cloud Ready

Confluent today announced that it has successfully achieved the Google Cloud Ready - Cloud SQL Designation for Cloud SQL, Google Cloud’s fully managed relational database service for MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQL Server.  

Google Cloud Ready - Cloud SQL is a new designation for the solutions of Google Cloud’s technology partners that integrate with Cloud SQL. These partners have closely collaborated with Google to add support for Cloud SQL MySQL, PostgreSQL, or SQL Server into their solutions and tune their existing functionality for optimal outcomes. This designation recognizes the partner solutions that have met a core set of functional requirements and validated in collaboration with Google Cloud engineering teams. 

This is an essential step toward businesses truly modernizing. Nowadays, customer experiences are constantly evolving, with retail at the forefront of this. For years, globalization, accessibility, and e-commerce have changed how we shop, and with that, our expectations as consumers have evolved. We’re already collecting the data we need to provide users with the customized experiences they’ve come to expect. It’s time to think about how you unlock the value of it.

Delivering to those expectations requires a new way of thinking and systems ready to support constant innovation. We’ve recently seen generative AI become part of our everyday vocabulary and with that, the revelation that our infrastructure isn’t robust enough to keep pace.

Current data infrastructure systems are disjointed

To better illustrate, here’s a recent personal experience where data infrastructure made an impact on me. I received an attractive promotional email from a major retailer—one of those 24-hour sales. I was sold. I found a pair of sunglasses I liked and, in just a couple of clicks, I bought them.

Fast forward a couple of days. Instead of receiving the sunglasses, I received an email from the retailer saying “We’re sorry to inform you the item you purchased is no longer in stock.”

I’ve worked in retail infrastructure for enough years to know there’s a very long list of things that could have gone wrong with this transaction, but at the end of the day, it comes down to one single issue: the disparate systems weren’t sharing data in real time. 

Sound familiar? Let’s unpack why this happened. In the image above, you see critical data stored in legacy databases, outdated points of sale systems (that can only update local databases through an MQTT protocol), disjointed cloud applications, etc. These disparate systems all have left companies with islands of disconnected data and slow, periodic batch processing that doesn’t match the real-time operations required to meet the expectations of end consumers. 

Transform your business with real-time database streaming

The manual task of organizing and connecting those data silos is not only daunting in terms of required effort but often leads to downtime that impacts the business. The commonly proposed solutions to maintain business continuity are expensive and often require multi-year efforts, spanning multiple teams and tools. 

This is where Google and Confluent come in, and why the new designation is so essential. Our joint mission is to create an even easier path forward for companies looking to connect data across any environment to Google Cloud and harness it in real time. Confluent helps enterprises continuously collect and curate changing data from heterogeneous sources, on-premises and in the cloud, and stream it in real time to Google Cloud SQL so that every system and application has a consistent, up-to-date, and enhanced view of the data at all times. From APIs and a drag-and-drop UI to pre-built connectors, change data capture (CDC), and continuous SQL-based processing, Confluent simplifies streaming pipelines to Google Cloud SQL. Features such as Cluster Linking and our extended ecosystem of fully managed connectors can help your company accelerate cloud database modernizations. We've even shown how to do it with Google Cloud SQL.  

By earning the Google Cloud Ready - Cloud SQL Designation for Cloud SQL designation, Confluent has proven that the MySQL Sink, PostgreSQL Sink, and PostgreSQL CDC Source connectors meet a core set of functional and interoperability requirements when integrating with Cloud SQL and that refined documentation is available for ease of onboarding by our mutual customers. This designation enables customers to discover and have confidence that the products they use work well with Cloud SQL, and for prospective users to save time evaluating them. 

Being part of the program allows us to collaborate closely with Google Partner Engineering and Cloud SQL teams to develop joint roadmaps that benefit our customer use cases. 

Overall, our partnership with Google is aimed at helping organizations of all sizes and industries unlock the power of real-time data to drive deeper insights, make informed decisions, and transform their businesses. If you’re ready to start, sign up for a 30-day free trial of Confluent Cloud on Google Cloud Marketplace.