Let’s say you are a happy BigQuery user, and you spend about 100 euro a month on it. This may be fine for your (small) business but an expensive query is quick to make. What is expensive? Because really, it’s hard to create one that costs more than 30 euro. But what if someone accidentally deploys something that fires off a 1 euro query every second? That means a 2.6 million (!) BQ bill. If you don’t notice for a few days you’ll find yourself begging Google for a refund of hundreds of thousands of euros. ...

In my bubble it’s always been common knowledge that a database connection over a Unix socket is faster than that same connection over a TCP connection. But does this boat still float when using the Google recommended way to access Cloud SQL from GKE: with Google Cloud Proxy as a sidecar in a pod? Since Cloud Proxy moves data over a TCP tunnel, speed should be identical. So to save everyone a little time, I did some very minimal benchmarking: ...