Google Cloud SQL read replicas are now available in preview mode for MySQL 5.5 (support for MySQL 5.6 is coming soon).

Read Replica instances allow data from the master instance to be replicated to one or more slaves. This setup can provide increased read throughput. It can also enable the use of Cloud SQL instances as a hot standby for disaster recovery and for running OLAP queries without affecting the performance of the master instance. This support for Cloud SQL Read Replicas comes in addition to the existing support for using customer-managed MySQL instances (running on-premise, on Compute Engine or in another environment) as Read Replicas.

You can try it now by following these instructions.

-Posted by Aditya Mone, Software Engineer