It took a global pandemic for enterprises to pick up their database migration pace from a walk to a sprint, but Google is looking to accelerate that motion with a preview launch of its serverless Database Migration Service (DMS) that offers a first-class flight to fully managed cloud databases like Google Cloud SQL.

DMS can migrate self-hosted MySQL databases, either on-premises or in the cloud as well as managed databases from other clouds, to Cloud SQL for MySQL. Support for PostgreSQL is currently available for limited customers in preview, with SQL Server coming soon, the company said.

The platform utilizes log shipping to replicate data at low latencies from the source database to the destination. It then streams the initial snapshot of data and continuously replicates new data as it arrives in the source.

Migration is a tricky, tedious endeavor laden with costly and error-prone manual steps – or at least that’s what the commonly used one-size-fits-all database migration services have to offer, Andi Gutmans, GM and VP of databases engineering for Google, explained.

And as more enterprises shift database workloads, Gutmans said, customers are seeking “set it and forget it” services – whether that's serverless or fully managed services like Cloud SQL – to free IT personnel from managing infrastructure so they can focus innovating at the application level.

Although Google might be tardy to the migration party, Gutmans said that’s because the company avoided the traditional, more “generic approach” that vendors like Amazon Web Services (AWS) with its Database Migration Service (DMS) and Oracle with its Autonomous Database have tried.

“The initial school of thought was do it like the other vendors with a middle-tier server and replication, and add to the innovation,” Gutmans said. “But, frankly we found a new way of doing it [database migration] that is a lot easier than what anyone else is offering.”

According to Gutmans, Google’s recipe for an easier offering called for three ingredients: Simplicity, reliability, and a serverless experience.

DMS is designed to be “as frictionless as possible,” specifically as it relates to customers’ biggest pain point when it comes to setting up connectivity between the source and the target database, Gutmans explained. To simplify this process, Google took a no documentation approach and instead uses a virtual wizard to walk users through connectivity configuration.

The new offering leverages native database replication that bypasses the need for a middle replication server by orchestrating the source and target to talk to each other directly. “This replication technique maximizes the fidelity of data transferred with very low latency,” Gutmans said. “That means the user can decide when they’re ready to promote their database with minimal downtime.”

DMS’s serverless capability executes functions like provisioning, managing, or monitoring migration-specific resources, replicating the source database’s data, schema, triggers, and stored procedures to the Cloud SQL destination, eliminating the need for manual oversight.

The service launch comes as Google continues to go all-in on its migration programs that seek to meet customer demand for easier, faster, more predictable, and more reliable services to accelerate their digital migration.

But that’s just half of the picture.

Cloud migration services are not only about efficiently moving workloads to the cloud, they’re also a catalyst for driving public cloud providers’ market growth. As the No. 3 player in the cloud ecosystem, according to the latest data from Synergy Research Group, Google is in a position to venture off the beaten path to find innovative that can challenge AWS and Microsoft – who have solidified their No. 1 and No. 2 positions, respectively.

“We do think that DMS is the fast track to the cloud and we're going to continue to accelerate our investment on migrations so our customers can focus on core business needs and not on the infrastructure management and migration,” Gutmans said.

As for helping organizations move into the cloud, Google launched its Cloud App Modernization Program (CAMP) that uses a data-driven assessment of an organization’s current infrastructure footprint to map out a modernization path. It then conveniently offers Google’s portfolio of cloud products to help execute a migration path.

Google earlier this year expanded the reach of its Anthos platform into those competing clouds with an initial multi-cloud push into AWS. Goldberg said the company remained on track to add support for Microsoft Azure later this year.