Dress4Win has asked you for advice on how to migrate their on-premises MySQL deployment to the cloud. They want to minimize downtime and performance impact to their on-premises solution during the migration. Which approach should you recommend?

This approach minimizes downtime and performance impact because it allows the on-premises master to continue serving traffic during the migration. By setting up a cloud replica, data is continuously synchronized without affecting the primary database's operations. Once the cloud replica is fully caught up, a quick cutover can be performed, switching applications to the cloud database with minimal interruption. The other options are less suitable: Creating a dump and shutting down the master causes significant downtime. Writing to both on-premises and cloud masters simultaneously introduces complex data consistency challenges and potential data loss if not managed perfectly. Migrating to Cloud Datastore involves a schema change and application refactoring, which is outside the scope of simply migrating a MySQL deployment and would introduce significant complexity and potential downtime.