As a Solutions Engineer at Percona, one of my responsibilities is to support our customers as they investigate new and emerging technologies. This affords me the opportunity to speak to many current and new customers who partner with Percona.

The topic of Kubernetes is becoming more popular as companies are investigating and adopting this technology. The issue most companies are encountering is having a stateful database that doesn’t fall victim to an environment tuned for ephemeral workloads. This obviously introduces a level of complexity as to how to run a stateful database in an inherently stateless world, as databases are not natively designed for that.

To make your life easier, as a part of the Percona Cloud-Native Autonomous Database Initiative, our engineering teams have built a …

How to build a multi-region, multi-master MySQL cloud database back-end capable of serving a global high volume cloud contact center

This global SaaS provider is a Cloud Contact Center solution provider (the leading Salesforce telephony solution), who needed to deliver up-to-date data to clients as quickly as possible. Its cloud-based call center software frees users to make every conversation personal; it supports the creation of exceptional customer experiences that help serve better and sell more. Its technology is 100% cloud-based and device-agnostic for telephony infrastructure.

What is the Challenge?

Active/Active (multi-master) MySQL clustering is needed when there is significant update load on geographically distributed applications. These require fast response times both for updates and reads, and they also need to share data on a global scale.

• Regional distribution of data
• Deliver …

Let’s continue our series of using OCI to install popular Open Source programs with MySQL 8.0. After WordPress, Drupal, it’s not the Moodle’s turn!

This is a request from my Japanese colleague Machiko

We will use two different compute instances:

• the application server (apache, PHP and Moodle)
• the database server (MySQL 8.0)

The application server will be reachable from the Internet on port 22 (ssh) and 80 (http). The database server won’t be reachable from outside, we will have to use the application server as jumphost to install the server.

This is an overview of the proposed architecture:

Deploying 2 compute instances

The first step is to install 2 compute instances, one in the Public Subnet and one in the Private Subnet.

We first start with the application server (called myMoodle):

As the second instance will be located …

How to serve global IoT customers in the cloud – and secure SaaS revenue using Tungsten Clustering on cloud-based database services

SaaS providers typically rely on providing a quality service across multiple locations, with the best application and database availability. They tend to be growth-oriented and need to ensure that their business will always be available without having to worry about how their databases will achieve continuous operations.

Our customer for this use case is a global SaaS provider with an open data exchange platform for the Internet of Things (IoT) that has customers all over the globe.

This use case looks at how our customer migrated from a single region Amazon RDS deployment to a truly global, geo-distributed multi-master Tungsten Clustering database solution – a better, more scalable solution at a lower total cost. And how they did so without having to change their application, all the …

The other day on a call, a client asked me an interesting question.  We were discussing some testing they were doing in Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS).  The question came up “since RDS is managed, how can I prove to my security team that the data is actually encrypted?”  We’ve all read whitepapers and blogs that talk about encryption in the cloud, but it is something I’ve not needed to validate before.  Instead, I just enable encryption when I create an RDS instance and move along to the next steps of the setup. This discussion really got me thinking – what is the best way to enable and test encryption at rest in my RDS instance?

Encryption at Rest – MySQL Fundamentals

Before getting too far into the RDS specifics, I wanted to cover the basics of encryption at rest in MySQL.  There are essentially two ways to encrypt data at rest:

• Full disk encryption (filesystem/block …

In the previous post, we setup a Drupal website with MySQL as backend on a different compute instance in a different subnet.

Today we will increase the High Availability of our Database by transforming this single MySQL instance into a MySQL InnoDB Cluster!

The architecture will be the following:

We will use 2 different Availability Domains (AD), of course we could have used 3, it’s up to you.

We will install MySQL Router on the Application Server as advised, and we will modify our Drupal’s configuration to connect locally on the R/W port of the MySQL Router.

You will see that this is very easy to achieve, the most …

My previous post related on how to install WordPress on Oracle Cloud seemed to be very popular. To continue the exploration of OCI, today we will install Drupal.

This time, even if it’s possible to use the Free Trier like in the WordPress post, I will use a pay account to have the possibility to split the Web Server and the Database into two different subnets. Both instances will have their own subnet and only the Webserver will be reachable directly from the Internet. MySQL will be installed on a private subnet that could reach Internet only via a NAT gateway.

This is an overview of the proposed architecture:

At the end of the blog you will also be able to see this process in video.

…

More and more people are nowadays thinking of cloud migration. The question of “Which cloud provider performs better for my MySQL workload?” is really common but cannot always be easily answered. However, there are ways to come up with an answer. This question also applies when thinking of moving to any provider, not necessarily a cloud one or DBaaS.

The Problem

The most reliable conclusion can be found if you have a testing environment that is fully identical and can produce the same amount of traffic compared to your production version. In this case, the comparison should be straightforward as what you have to do is point your testing environment against the under-evaluation (cloud) providers, and evaluate the differences in performance. But this is not always easy, as many organizations do not have such environments or it’s not always possible to replay all traffic.

The Idea

In this …

There are many users of MySQL in Cloud environment regions. It’s ideal that those MySQL instances are implemented with only private-ips in the respective Subnet. No public-ips. For that matter, all cloud infrastructure resources are ideally placed behind networks that provision only private-ips.  This limits any front-end attack surface for an application stack.  Certainly the up coming MySQL… Read More »

Percona is happy to announce the experimental release of Percona XtraDB Cluster 8.0. This is a major step for tuning Percona XtraDB Cluster to be more cloud- and user-friendly. This is the second experimental release that combines the updated and feature-rich Galera 4, with substantial improvements made by our development team.

Improvements and New Features in Percona XtraDB Cluster

Galera 4, included in Percona XtraDB Cluster 8.0, has many new features. Here is a list of the most essential improvements:

• Streaming replication to support large transactions
• The synchronization functions allow action coordination (wsrep_last_seen_gtid, wsrep_last_written_gtid, wsrep_sync_wait_upto_gtid)
• More granular and improved error logging. wsrep_debug is …