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Friday Fun Thread for July 4, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Why not set up a machine instance in one of the VPCs, ssh into it, run mysqldump against the source DB and pipe it to mysql connecting to the destination DB? The piping avoids storing it on a disk/bucket.

Why would the security team kill you for connecting to public IPs? Just make sure TLS is enabled and you're good to go. Also if both VPCs are in the same AZ/DC you're likely not going to go over the internet. You might not even go over the Internet between Google Cloud DCs.

Might need to ask an LLM for the right set of options to disable buffering and select the databases you want to clone.

Re. mysqldump, that's what we did last time we had to do this, but I was hoping there was a less manual way. You can do automate anything with enough scripts and DevOps duct tape, but I try to take zero maintenance options whenever I can because I have to scale my meager team and hiring is rough now (because our budget is shit).

Re. the security team, the tech details matter less than the perception. They're more of a compliance team than a security team. Such is life outside of Silicon Valley, sadly.

ha I'm more the opposite. The shell script is legible and easier to reason about. Using some GCP widget is going to not work for some mysterious reason and getting help is impossible if the docs don't cover your use case.

In an ideal world where I have enough guys, I far prefer the script or custom tooling because, as you point out, it's whitebox and easy to fix and customize. But that's not usually the case, plus as a manager I have to play departmental politics. It's much better to be able to blame GCP than to have fingers pointed at scripts that we wrote (sometimes unjustly!) when we have a huge backlog and no time to fix them. I'm looking forward to changing companies, if you can't tell.