Geo-scale MySQL – or how to build a global, multi-region MySQL cloud back-end capable of serving several hundred million player accounts

This blog introduces a series of blogs we’ll be publishing over the next few months that discuss a number of different customer use cases that our solutions support and that centre around achieving continuous MySQL operations with commercial-grade high availability (HA), geographically redundant disaster recovery (DR) and global scaling.

This first use case looks at a customer of ours who are a global gaming company with several hundred million world-wide player accounts.

What is the challenge?

How to reliably, and fast, cater to hundreds of millions of game players around the world? The challenge here is to serve a game application for a geographically-distributed audience; in other words, a pretty unique challenge.

It requires fast, local response times …

Overview

Clustering provides high availability and disaster recovery, along with the ability to read-scale both locally and globally. Some clusters even provide active/active capabilities, which others have a single master.

Real time database replication is a must for clustering and other key business purposes, like reporting. There are a number of replication technologies available for MySQL, and some are even bundled into various solutions. When choosing a replication methodology, it is paramount to understand just how the data moves from source to target. In this blog post, we will examine how asynchronous, synchronous, and “semi-synchronous” replication behave when used for clustering. Also, we will explore how …

We’re happy to announce that our white paper ‘Tungsten Clustering – Benefits & Configurations’ for MySQL, MariaDB and Percona Server is available to read on our website.

Tungsten Clustering is a one-of-a-kind software solution that provides clustering, disaster recovery and high availability for MySQL, MariaDB & Percona Server databases.

It allows enterprises running business-critical database applications to cost-effectively achieve continuous operations on a global scale with:

• Commercial-grade high availability (HA)
• Geographically redundant disaster recovery (DR)
• Global operations with geographically distributed multi-master

…

Why does the DIY approach fail to deliver vs. the Tungsten Clustering solution for geo-distributed MySQL multimaster deployments?

Before we dive into the 10 reasons, note why commercially-supported enterprise software is less risky and in fact less costly:

• The labor time spent building and maintaining a DIY solution costs more than a supported solution that just works.
• There is documentation, training, support, so your mission-critical process is never dependent upon an irreplaceable individual.

1. Tungsten Clustering is a complete solution, comprised of the Replicator, Manager and Connector components
   • With DIY, you must first decide the architecture, then select the individual tools to handle each layer of the topology. …

Database Administration is a tough, often ungrateful job. Especially if you run a 24/7 business-critical MySQL or MariaDB deployment.

MySQL has proven to be a remarkably solid database which supports billions of dollars in revenue. On some level this very solidity creates a false sense of security. There are many things that can wrong at any given time, whether that is a change to your app, a bug in the database, hardware failure or just simply running out of disk space.

Percona recently conducted a poll: “What keeps you up at night?”

Not surprisingly, “Downtime/HA” is very high on the list.

While there are many challenging issues and tasks that a DBA must deal …

If you share your photos on social media, they will stay on the internet forever…

Many of us have heard or read this sentence during conversations with friends, in articles, online forums, TV shows, etc.

But how is it possible that we can’t seem to be able to fully remove our photos from the internet when we want to, and, taking this further, that our photos are never lost and always retrievable (which can both be a good and a bad thing)?

The behind-the-scenes, technical secret lies in data replication.

The very first moment when you share a photo on social media, that photo is uploaded into the closest available database server. In the second moment, that same photo is replicated into multiple other servers around the world.

This is what data …

PALO ALTO, Calif., June 6, 2019 – ScaleGrid, the Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) leader in the SQL and NoSQL space, has announced the expansion of their fully managed MySQL Hosting services to support Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. The platform allows MySQL AWS administrators to automate their time-consuming database operations in the cloud and improve their performance with high availability, disaster recovery, polyglot persistence, and advanced monitoring and analytics.

Over the years, migrating data to the cloud has become a top priority for organizations looking to modernize their infrastructure for improved security, performance, and …

Some months ago, Shlomi Noach published a series about Service Discovery.  In his posts, Shlomi describes many ways for an application to find the master.  He also gives detail on how these solutions cope with failing-over to a slave, including their integration with Orchestrator.

This is a great series, and I recommend its reading for everybody implementing master failover, with or without

Enterprises require high availability for their business-critical applications. Even the smallest unplanned outage or even a planned maintenance operation can cause lost sales, productivity, and erode customer confidence. Additionally, updating and retrieving data needs to be robust to keep up with user demand.

Let’s take a look at how Tungsten Clustering helps enterprises keep their data available and globally scalable, and compare it to Amazon’s RDS running MySQL (RDS/MySQL).

Replicas and Failover What does RDS do?

Having multiple copies of a database is ideal for high availability. RDS/MySQL approaches this with “Multi-AZ” deployments. The term “Multi-AZ” here is a bit confusing, as enabling this simply means a single “failover replica” will be created in a different availability zone from the primary database instance. …

In this blog post, we talk about how to run applications across multiple clouds (i.e. AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure) using Continuent Clustering. You want your business-critical applications to withstand node, datacenter, availability-zone or regional failures. For SaaS apps, you also want to bring data close to your application users for faster response times and a better user experience. With cross-cloud capability, Continuent also helps avoid lock-in to any particular cloud provider.

The key to success for the database layer is to be available and respond rapidly.

From both a business and operational perspective, spreading the application across cloud environments from different vendors provides significant protection against vendor-specific outages and vendor lock-in. Running on multiple platforms provides greater …