GCP Professional Cloud Architect Practice Question

Your company operates a 15 TB PostgreSQL 12 database on Amazon RDS. You need to move the data into Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL while keeping application downtime under one minute. The operations team insists that the approach must 1) use a fully managed Google Cloud service, 2) allow unlimited rehearsal migrations without additional licensing costs, and 3) replicate ongoing data changes over an existing Cloud VPN link between AWS and Google Cloud. Which migration strategy best satisfies all of these requirements?

Create a continuous Database Migration Service job that replicates from the RDS instance to Cloud SQL over the existing Cloud VPN, perform any number of rehearsal runs, and promote the Cloud SQL instance during a brief cut-over.
Use BigQuery Data Transfer Service to load the data from RDS into BigQuery, transform it with Cloud Dataflow, and continuously stream the transformed data into Cloud SQL before switching the application.
Export the RDS database to Amazon S3, copy the dump to Cloud Storage with Storage Transfer Service, then import it into Cloud SQL during the maintenance window.
Migrate the schema and data with the HarbourBridge/Spanner Migration Tool into Cloud Spanner and configure Database Migration Service for ongoing replication before redirecting traffic.

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Answer Description

Google Cloud's Database Migration Service (DMS) is a serverless, fully managed offering that supports homogeneous migrations from Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL to Cloud SQL. By configuring a continuous migration job and connecting the source database to Google Cloud through Cloud VPN (or Interconnect), DMS sets up logical replication that keeps the Cloud SQL instance synchronized with ongoing changes. Because replication continues until you promote the target instance, the final cut-over typically completes in seconds, holding total application downtime well below one minute. DMS is billed on a pay-as-you-go basis with no separate licensing, so teams can run as many dry-run or rehearsal migrations as needed.

An export-and-import workflow using Amazon S3 and Cloud Storage can take the initial dump while the source remains online, but it does not capture ongoing changes; you would still need a final dump and restore, leading to a longer cut-over window that exceeds the sub-minute goal. BigQuery Data Transfer Service is designed for analytical data loading and is not intended for transactional PostgreSQL-to-Cloud SQL migrations. HarbourBridge targets Cloud Spanner migrations, and even though DMS can stream changes into Spanner, moving to Spanner would not meet the requirement to land on Cloud SQL.

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