Professional Cloud Database Engineer

As a Professional Cloud Database Engineer, I bring two years of dedicated Google Cloud experience and five years of overall database and IT expertise. I specialize in designing, creating, managing, and troubleshooting Google Cloud databases that applications rely on for storing and retrieving data, and I am adept at translating business and technical requirements into scalable and cost-effective database solutions. My design capabilities include performing thorough capacity and usage planning by sizing solutions based on workload metrics and future requirements, evaluating performance and cost tradeoffs of different configurations like machine types and storage options (HDD versus SSD), and sizing database compute and storage based on performance needs. I am also skilled in evaluating high availability and disaster recovery options, considering tradeoffs between multi-region, regional, and zonal deployment strategies, defining maintenance windows, planning database upgrades, and determining how applications will securely and efficiently connect to the database, which includes configuring network security with tools like the Cloud SQL Auth Proxy, CMEK, and SSL certificates, justifying session pooler services, and assessing auditing policies for managed services. Furthermore, I can differentiate between managed and unmanaged database services, distinguish between SQL and NoSQL business requirements for various data structures, analyze the cost of running database solutions in Google Cloud, and assess application and database dependencies to select the most appropriate solutions.

Beyond initial design, I effectively manage database solutions that can span multiple database types by determining Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies for database connectivity and access control, and managing database users, including their authentication and access. I configure robust database monitoring and troubleshooting options, which involves assessing slow-running queries, database locking, identifying missing indexes, monitoring and investigating database vitals such as RAM, CPU, storage, and I/O using Cloud Logging, monitoring and updating quotas, investigating database resource contention, and setting up alerts for errors and performance metrics. I design effective database backup and recovery solutions tailored to SLAs, SLOs, Recovery Time Objective (RTO), and Recovery Point Objective (RPO), including configuring automatic scheduled backups and data export/import processes. My skills also cover optimizing database cost and performance in Google Cloud by assessing options for scaling up and scaling out, scaling database instances based on workload, defining replication strategies, and continuously assessing and optimizing operational costs. I am also proficient in determining solutions to automate database tasks such as performing database maintenance, assessing table fragmentation, and scheduling database exports.

Finally, my capabilities extend to designing and implementing data migration and replication. This includes developing and executing migration strategies and plans for scenarios like zero downtime, near-zero downtime, and extended outages, complete with fallback plans and schema conversion. I can manage reverse replication from Google Cloud to source and determine the correct database migration tools for any given scenario. I apply these concepts to deploy highly scalable and available databases in Google Cloud by provisioning high availability solutions, periodically testing high availability and disaster recovery strategies, setting up multi-regional replication, assessing requirements for read replicas, and automating database instance provisioning.