Connecting to MySQL database on Google Cloud from localhost application

I have recently set up a MySQL database on Google Cloud. I have whitelisted my IP address and can connect to it using MySQL workbench without any problems.

I am developing a PHP application, which I run on localhost:8000. Things worked fine when I was connecting to a local MySQL instance, however I run into problems when trying to connect to the Google Cloud instance.

It seems that a connection is being made (I tried deliberately connecting with the wrong hostname and get a 'No such host is known' error). Using the IP address : port number of the Google Cloud instance, I get problems with the tables not being recognised, which I assume means that I have connected to the host but it is failing to pick up on the schema properly.

I was wondering if this problem is due to the fact that the connection is being called from the localhost and I need to set something up on Google Cloud to allow this.

Could anybody tell me

(1) If this is likely to be the problem and, if so,

(2) How do I allow access from localhost on Google?

For further information, I connect using

pdo = new PDO($dsn, "root", <password>, $options);

where

$dsn = "mysql:host=<ip-address>:<port>;dbname=<schema-name>;"

and

$options = [
   PDO::ATTR_PERSISTENT => false,
   PDO::ATTR_ERRMODE => PDO::ERRMODE_EXCEPTION,
   PDO::SQLSRV_ATTR_FETCHES_NUMERIC_TYPE => true,
   PDO::ATTR_STRINGIFY_FETCHES => false
];

The following worked fine on the local instance:

$dsn = "mysql:host=localhost:3306;dbname=<schema-name>;"

Thanks in advance!

Solution

After some playing around, I discovered that my problem was nothing to do with the fact that I was calling the database from localhost. In fact, it was because the Google platform was being case-sensitive about table names, whereas my local version of MySQL was not.

So the answer to my question is that this is not to do with the running the application on localhost.