If you are automating your infrastructure deployments with Chef, then read on. We are glad to announce the availability of a Chef cookbook for ClusterControl. This cookbook replaces previous cookbooks we released for ClusterControl and Galera Cluster. For those using Puppet, please have a look at our Puppet module for ClusterControl.

ClusterControl Cookbook on Chef Supermarket

The ClusterControl cookbook is available on Chef Supermarket, and getting the cookbook is as easy as:

$ knife cookbook site download clustercontrol

This cookbook supports the installation of ClusterControl on top of existing database clusters:

• Galera Cluster
  • MySQL Galera Cluster by Codership
  …

For an online shop, the website is the cash register. It has to be open for business 24 hours a day.

As the ops person on duty, when you get a call at 3am after your website went down, your priority number one is to restore the service asap. But why can we not have our application stack automatically recover, and not have the pager wake us at all? Why do we still stick to tedious manual processes, which take up time and resources, and hinder future growth?

Infrastructure automation isn’t easy, but it’s not rocket science either, says Riaan Nolan. Riaan has been in operations for the past decade, and has built over a dozen eCommerce properties. Automation is a worthwhile investment for retailers serious about eCommerce, but deciding on which tools to invest in can be a confusing and overwhelming process.

Join us for this webinar to understand the key pain points that online retailers experience which indicate it’s time …

Thanks to everyone who attended and participated in last week’s webinar on 'Galera Cluster for MySQL vs MySQL (NDB) Cluster: A High Level Comparison'. If you missed the sessions or would like to watch the webinar again & browse through the slides, they are now available online.

In this webinar, Severalnines VP of Products, Alex Yu, who was part of the team at Ericsson who originally developed the NDB storage engine in 2001, gave an overview of the two clustering architectures and discussed their respective strengths and weaknesses: 

1. MySQL Cluster architecture: strengths and limitations
2. Galera Architecture: strengths and limitations
3. Deployment scenarios
4. Data migration
5. Read and write workloads (Optimistic/pessimistic locking)
6. WAN/Geographical replication
7. Schema changes
8. Management and monitoring …

December 8, 2014 By Severalnines

Percona XtraBackup is a great backup tool with lots of nice features to make online and consistent backups, although the variety of options can be a bit overwhelming. s9s_backup tries to make it simpler for users, it creates an easy to use interface for XtraBackup features such as full backups, incremental backups, streaming/non-streaming, and parallel compression.

Backups are organized into backup sets, consisting of a full backup and zero or more incremental backups. s9s_backup manages the LSNs (Log Sequence Number) of the XtraBackups. The backup set can then be restored as one single unit using just one command.

In earlier posts, we covered various ways on restoring your backup files …

December 1, 2014 By Severalnines

MariaDB 10 supports multi-source replication, and each MariaDB Galera node can have up to 64 masters connected to it. So it is possible to use a MariaDB Cluster as an aggregator for many single-instance MariaDB master servers.

In this blog post, we are going to show you how to setup multi-source replication with MariaDB Galera Cluster, where one of the Galera nodes is acting as slave to 3 MariaDB masters (see diagram below). If you would like to set this up with Percona XtraDB Cluster or Galera Cluster (Codership), please read this post instead.

MariaDB GTID vs MySQL GTID

MariaDB has a different implementation of Global Transaction ID (GTID), and is enabled by default starting from MariaDB 10.0.2. Multi-source replication in MariaDB works …

November 20, 2014 By Severalnines

Multi-source replication means that one server can have multiple masters from which it replicates. Why multi-source? One good reason is to consolidate databases (e.g. merge your shards) for analytical reporting or as a centralized backup server. MariaDB 10 already has this feature, and MySQL 5.7 will also support it. 

It is possible to set up your Galera Cluster as an aggregator of your masters in a multi-source replication setup, we’ll walk you through the steps in this blog. Note that the howto is for Galera Cluster for MySQL (Codership) and Percona XtraDB Cluster. In a separate post, we’ll show you how to configure MariaDB Cluster 10 instead. If you would like to use MySQL Cluster (NDB) as aggregator, then check out this blog.

Galera …

November 19, 2014 By Severalnines

Following the release of ClusterControl 1.2.8 with a range of cool new features, we have now also published a new ClusterControl User Guide that provides all the steps, tips & tricks to follow in order to successfully deploy, monitor, manage and scale database clusters.  

This user guide predominantly covers ClusterControl with MySQL-based clusters, namely:

• Percona XtraDB Cluster
• MariaDB Cluster
• Galera Cluster for MySQL (Codership)
• MySQL Cluster
• MySQL Replication
• A pool of MySQL single instances

New features in ClusterControl 1.2.8 include: 

• Deployment and scaling of …

Even if a Galera node looks like a regular MySQL server, the underlying replication mechanism is very different. This implies some changes in the way you have to configure the Galera nodes. Here are some of the most common misconceptions about Galera when using Percona XtraDB Cluster.

Q: Why should I enable binary logging as it is not needed by Galera replication?
Unlike for regular asynchronous MySQL replication, it is true that you don’t need to enable binary logging to use Galera replication. However what if someone runs an accidental DROP TABLE?

In this case, the statement will be replicated immediately on all nodes. Then your main option to recover lost data is to use a backup. But if binary logging is not …

November 14, 2014 By Severalnines

Thanks to everyone who attended and participated in this week's webinar on '9 DevOps Tips for Going in Production with Galera Cluster for MySQL'. If you missed the sessions or would like to watch the webinar again & browse through the slides, they are now available online.

In this webinar, Severalnines CTO Johan Andersson discussed 9 key aspects to consider before taking Galera Cluster for MySQL into production:

• 101 Sanity Check
• Operating System
• Backup Strategies
• Galera Recovery
• Query Performance
• Schema changes
• Security / Encryption
• Reporting
• Protecting from Disasters

Watch the replay 9 DevOps Tips for Going in …

November 7, 2014 By Severalnines

PrestaShop is a popular open source e-commerce software powering over 200,000 online stores, according to the company. We’ve seen a bit of interest into high availability PrestaShop setups, so this post will show you how to achieve that on multiple servers. Note that this setup not only caters for failures, but by load balancing traffic across multiple servers, it also allows the system to scale and handle more users.

This post is similar to our previous posts on web application scalability and high availability:

• Magento - nginx, MySQL Galera Cluster, OCFS2
• Drupal - Apache, MySQL Galera Cluster, csync2 with …