A blog post on how to deploy a sample JBoss application on OpenShift Flex - using a highly available, scalable backend that leverages MySQL Cluster

The Severalnines team has been busy during the summer months and as result, we have included OpenShift Flex support to our Severalnines Configurator (amongst other things). OpenShift, a Platform-as-a-Service operated by Red Hat, allows developers to develop and manage applications in the cloud. It is now possible to configure a clustered MySQL database for cloud services running on OpenShift. This brings high-availability and scalability at both the application and database layers.

As a guest contributor on …

Supporting successful services on the web means scaling your back-end databases across multiple dimensions. This blog focuses on scaling access methods to your data using SQL and/or NoSQL interfaces.

In Part 1 of the blog series , I discussed scaling database performance using auto-sharding and active/active geographic replication in MySQL Cluster to enable applications to scale both within and across data centers.  

In Part 2, I discussed the need to scale operational agility to keep pace with demand, which includes being able to add capacity and performance to the database, and to evolve the schema – all without downtime.

So in this blog I want …

Deploying in the Amazon cloud is touted as a great way to achieve high scalability while paying only for the computing power you use. How do you get the best scalability from the technology?

1. Use Auto-scaling

Auto-scaling is a unique feature of cloud computing and Amazon's EC2 offering. Setup a load balancer and a couple of webservers for your application as you normally would. Design your webserver based on a template AMI that you'll reuse over and over. Then setup auto-scaling and set thresholds based on the traffic you forecast. When a threshold is passed, AWS will spinup a new instance of your webserver, and roll it into the load balancer pool automatically. Once traffic falls below the scale back threshold, Amazon will take a server out of the pool for you.

Be sure to monitor this …

In my previous post, I discussed scaling web database performance in MySQL Cluster using auto-sharding and active/active geographic replication - enabling users to scale both within and across data centers.  

I also mentioned that while scaling write-performance of any web service is critical, it is only 1 of multiple dimensions to scalability, which include:

- The need to scale operational agility to keep pace with demand. This means being able to add capacity and performance to the database, and to evolve the schema – all without downtime;

- The need to scale queries by having flexibility in the APIs used to access the database – including SQL and NoSQL interfaces;

- The need to scale the database while maintaining continuous availability.

All of these subjects are discussed in more detail in …

The binary version for MySQL Cluster 7.1.15 has now been made available at http://www.mysql.com/downloads/cluster/

A description of all of the changes (fixes) that have gone into MySQL Cluster 7.1.15 (compared to 7.1.13) can be found in the official MySQL Cluster documentation for Cluster 7.1.14 & 7.1.15.

Introduction:

MySQL Cluster is a write-scalable, real-time, ACID-compliant transactional database, combining 99.999% availability with the low TCO of open source. Designed around a distributed, multi-master architecture with no single point of failure, MySQL Cluster scales horizontally on commodity hardware to serve read and write intensive workloads, accessed via SQL and NoSQL interfaces.

MySQL Cluster's real-time design delivers predictable, millisecond response times with the ability to service millions of operations per second. Support for in-memory and disk-based data, automatic data partitioning (sharding) with load balancing and the ability to add nodes to a running cluster with zero downtime allows linear database scalability to handle the most unpredictable web-based workloads.

…

Memcached access to MySQL Cluster

As described in an earlier post Memcached is an extremely popular caching layer used in most big web properties and we’re adding the ability to access MySQL Cluster directly using the familiar Memcached key-value/NoSQL API without needing to go through the MySQL Server. There is a huge amount of flexibility built into this solution – including:

• Decide what data should be held only in the Memcached server; what should be written straight through to MySQL Cluster and then discarded  and what data should be cached in Memcached but persisted in MySQL Cluster
• Where data is held both in Cluster and the Memcached server, they …

Clustered computing brings with it many benefits: high performance, high availability, scalable infrastructure, etc. But it also brings with it more complexity.

Why?

Well, by its very nature, there are more “moving parts” to monitor and manage (from physical, virtual and logical hosts) to clustering software to redundant networking components – the list goes on. And a cluster that isn’t effectively provisioned and managed will cause more downtime than the standalone systems it is designed to improve upon.

When it comes to the database industry, analysts already estimate that 50% of a typical database’s Total Cost of Ownership is attributable to staffing and downtime costs. These costs will only increase if a database cluster is not effectively monitored and managed.

Monitoring and management has been a major focus in the development of the …

The latest (GA) version of MySQL Cluster Manager is available through Oracle’s E-Delivery site. You can download the software and try it out for yourselves (just select “MySQL Database” as the product pack, select your platform, click “Go” and then scroll down to get the software).

So what’s new in this version

If you’ve looked at MCM in the past then the first thing that you’ll notice is that it’s now much simpler to get it up and running – in particular the configuration and running of the agent has now been reduced to just running a single executable (called "mcmd").

The second change is that you can now stop the MCM agents from within the MCM CLI – for example "stop agents mysite" will safely stop all of the agents running on the …

The realities of today’s successful web services are creating new demands that many legacy databases were just not designed to handle:

- The need to scale writes, as well as reads, both within and across geographically dispersed data centers;

- The need to scale operational agility to keep pace with database load and application requirements. This means being able to add capacity and performance to the database, and to evolve the schema – all without downtime;

- The need to scale queries by having flexibility in the APIs used to access the database;

- The need to scale the database while maintaining continuous availability for both failures as well as scheduled maintenance events.

Each of the requirements above warrant their own dedicated blog, which I’ll find time to write over the next few weeks.

But to get started, I wanted to discuss how the MySQL Cluster database addresses the first …