Reduce migration downtime

[Markus Albe]

Hello group!

I've been doing some research and seems it's absolutely impossible to migrate to 2nd generation without a dump, nor to setup 2nd generation MySQLs as slave of external masters or 1st Gen master...

Seems like quite a high barrier for migration;  Is there some hack/workaround/undocumented voodoo spell we can cast to avoid the dump and reload? Without being able to setup replication that means massive downtimes, and in all honesty: is pretty surprising to find a hopefully-more-advanced 2nd generation product which does not provide any low-downtime migration path (even when it could imply more machines or more complexity... *some* way would be great).

I hope am missing something and that in fact setting up 2nd generation as a slave of 1st generation would be possible?

Thanks in advance,

Markus

[George (Cloud Platform Support)]

Hello Markus, 

You are right: replicas are always the same generation (First Generation or Second Generation) as the master instance, as detailed on the "Requirements and Tips for Configuring Replication" documentation page.

The need to dump first is justified by the time-related differences in database content, as one needs to import data for a certain moment in time. More information on the migration process to second-generation can be gathered from the "Migrating an Instance to Second Generation" page.