I was fortunate to attend an Ops discussion about databases at the OpenStack Summit Atlanta this past May as one of the panelists. The discussion was about deadlock issues OpenStack operators see with Percona XtraDB Cluster (of course this is applicable to any Galera-based solution). I asked to describe what they are seeing, and as it turned out, nova and neutron uses the SELECT … FOR UPDATE SQL construct quite heavily. This is a topic I thought was worth writing about.

Write set replication in a nutshell (with oversimplification)

Any node is writable, and replication happens in write sets. A write …

Given the recent excitement & interest around OpenStack I wanted to make sure I was ready to conduct appropriate evaluations of system performance.  I generally turn to sysbench since it comes with a variety of different tests (accessed via –test= option interface), including:

• fileio – File I/O test
• cpu – CPU performance test
• memory – Memory functions speed test
• threads – Threads subsystem performance test
• mutex – Mutex performance test

As you can see, sysbench lets you stress many of the fundamental components of your hardware and infrastructure, such as your disk subsystem, along with your CPUs and memory. An additional option exists that is designed to perform synthetic stress testing of MySQL, and I was surprised when I didn’t see it in the above list on version 0.5, as it used to show up as “oltp – OLTP test”. What happened to …

OpenStack Trove Day

I just returned from a week in Cambridge, Massachusetts where I was attending the OpenStack Trove Day and the Trove mid-cycle meetup, both sponsored by the great folks at Tesora.

I am relatively new to the OpenStack and Trove arenas so this was a fantastic opportunity for me to learn more about the communities, the various components within OpenStack, and what part Trove plays. I found the entire event very worthwhile – I met a lot of key people in the community, learned more about Trove and its potential, and in general felt a great energy and excitement surrounding Trove and OpenStack as a whole.

There were more than 120 attendees at Trove Day. That is almost four times the initial estimate! I …

OpenStack Trove Day

I just returned from a week in Cambridge, Massachusetts where I was attending the OpenStack Trove Day and the Trove mid-cycle meetup, both sponsored by the great folks at Tesora.

I am relatively new to the OpenStack and Trove arenas so this was a fantastic opportunity for me to learn more about the communities, the various components within OpenStack, and what part Trove plays. I found the entire event very worthwhile – I met a lot of key people in the community, learned more about Trove and its potential, and in general felt a great energy and excitement surrounding Trove and OpenStack as a whole.

There were more than 120 attendees at Trove Day. That is almost four times the initial estimate! I think I …

In a previous post, my colleague Dimitri Vanoverbeke discussed at a high level the concepts of database as a service (DBaaS), OpenStack and OpenStack’s implementation of a DBaaS, Trove. Today I’d like to delve a bit further into Trove and discuss where it fits in, and who benefits.

Just to recap, Trove is OpenStack’s implementation of a database as a service for its cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS). And as the mission statement declares, the Trove project seeks to provide a scalable and reliable cloud database service providing functionality for both relational and non-relational database engines. With the current release of Icehouse, the technology has begun to show maturity providing both stability and a rich feature set.

…

Like you all may know, OpenStack is currently one of the coolest open source projects, so I was thrilled when I was asked to manage the deployment of an OpenStack lab for internal Percona use. Starting from basically zero, I created tasks in our Jira and assigned them to a pool of volunteer consultants. As usual in a service company, billing is the priority so I ended up losing the 2 senior guys but fortunately most of my time was with a customer that wasn’t very demanding and I could easily multitask with the project and fill the gap. So, here it goes…

Hardware

To deploy the OpenStack lab we were given 8 similar servers in our Durham, N.C. offices. The specs are:

• CPU: 12 physical cores (24 with HT)
• Disks: 1 sata 4 TB drive and one 480GB SSD drive
• Nics: 2x GbE
• OS: Centos 6

The hardware is recent …

August 15, 2014 By Severalnines

We're looking for an energetic and talented web developer to join our small but agile web team. This position is full-time and pay is negotiable. The hours are flexible and work can be done remotely.

Severalnines is a self-funded startup with a dozen employees; headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden and with a globally distributed, home-office based team. We provide automation and management software for database clusters. Our ClusterControl product is the leading management application for database clusters and is used by thousands of companies.

We were founded in 2010 and launched our product that same year, so you’ll be …

August 6, 2014 By Severalnines

Well over a thousand sessions have been submitted for the OpenStack Summit and two of them includes our good selves! We’ve submitted two talks with partners of ours: 

• ClusterControl: Efficient and reliable MySQL Management, Monitoring, and Troubleshooting for OpenStack HA)
• Deploying Databases for OpenStack

… and would love it if the talks were included in the final agenda. For that to happen, we need a few more of your votes today!

The OpenStack Summit is a five-day conference for developers, users, and …

MySQL plays a critical role in OpenStack. It serves as the host database supporting most components such as Nova, Glance, and Keystone and is the most mature guest database in Trove. Many OpenStack operators use Percona open source software including the MySQL drop-in compatible Percona Server and Galera-based Percona XtraDB Cluster as well as tools such as Percona XtraBackup and Percona Toolkit. We see a need in the community to understand how to improve MySQL performance …

We’ll be publishing a series of posts on OpenStack and Trove over the next few weeks, diving into their usage and purpose. For readers who are already familiar with these technologies, there should be no doubt as to why we are incredibly excited about them, but for those who aren’t, consider this a small introduction to the basics and concepts.

What is Database as a Service (DBaaS)?
In a nutshell, DBaaS – as it is frequently referred to – is a loose moniker to the concept of providing a managed cloud-based database environment accessible by users, applications or developers. Its aim is to provide a full-fledged database environment, while minimizing the administrative turmoil and pains of managing the surrounding infrastructure.

Real life example: Imagine you are working on a new application that has to be accessible from multiple regions. Building and maintaining a large multiregion …