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 …

I’ve recently worked with customers using replication rings with 4+ servers; several servers accepting writes. The idea behind this design is always the same: by having multiple servers, you get high availability and by having multiple writer nodes, you get write scalability. Alas, this is simply not true. Here is why.

High Availability

Having several servers is a necessary condition to have high availability, but it’s far from sufficient. What happens if for instance C suddenly disappears?

• The replication ring is broken, so updates from A and B will never go to D. D will then quickly become so out-of-date that it’s not going to be usable. But wait! A will no longer receive the updates from B so A …

Oracle have just made availble the new MySQL Cluster 7.4.1 Development Milestone Release – it can be downloaded from the development release tab here. Note that this is not a GA release and so we wouldn’t recommend using it in production.

There are three main focus areas for this DMR and the purpose of this post is to briefly introduce them:

• Active-Active (Multi-Master) Replication
• Performance
• Operational improvements (speeding up of restarts; enhanced memory reporting)

Active-Active (Multi-Master) Replication

MySQL Cluster allows bi-directional replication between two (or more) clusters. Replication within each cluster is synchronous but between clusters it is asynchronous which means …

September 26, 2014 By Severalnines

Paytrail is a leading e-payment method provider from Finland, and is expanding globally. Established in 2007, Paytrail currently has over 4,000 business customers, works with over 350 partners and its solution is available in all SEPA (Single Euro Payments Area) countries.

Paytrail offers a new online shopping solution that allows consumers to use one login for all of their online purchases. And it provides everything that is needed for online shopping in addition to traditional payment methods (bank e-payments, credit and debit card payments, invoicing and installments). 

This new case study describes how Paytrail came to work with Severalnines to achieve a fault-tolerant database cluster across two data centers.

MySQL Fabric is a new product and some folks are running into issues when trying to deploy test instances that grow beyond a single server.

The Fabric documentation has an example GRANT statement illustrating the simple localhost use case:

CREATE USER 'fabric'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'secret';
GRANT ALL ON *.* TO 'fabric'@'localhost';

The example shown above belies the more complex way that Fabric uses the fabric login.

The Fabric config file has 3 sections that deal with user and password values, I will only focus on the [servers] section of the configuration file.  The user and password defined in this section is used by the mysqlfabric utility to connect to managed servers …

September 11, 2014 By Severalnines

Thanks to everyone who attended and participated in this week’s webinar on ‘Performance Tuning of HAProxy for Database Load Balancing’. And special thanks to our guest speaker, Baptiste Assmann of HAProxy Technologies. 

If you missed the sessions or would like to watch the webinar again & browse through the slides, they are now available online.

Watch the replay of this webinar to learn about what HAProxy can tell you about your application and database instances. And understand the difference between short-lived connections and persistent connections, and how they affect the performance and availability of your applications. 

Watch the replay Performance …

September 3, 2014 By Severalnines

Running your database cluster on AWS is a great way to adapt to changing workloads by adding/removing instances, or by scaling up/down each instance. At Severalnines, we talk much more about scale-out than scale up, but there are cases where you might want to scale up an instance instead of scaling out. 

In this post, we’ll show you how to change instance sizes with respect to RAM, CPU and IOPS, and how to tune your Galera nodes accordingly. Moreover, this post assumes that instances are launched using Amazon VPC.

When do we need to upgrade an instance?

You typically need to upgrade an instance when you run out of server resources. This includes CPU, RAM, storage capacity, disk throughput and bandwidth. You must allow enough headroom for …

August 28, 2014 By Severalnines Check Out Our Latest Resources for MySQL, MariaDB & MongoDB Clusters

Here is a summary of resources & tools that we’ve made available to you in the past weeks. If you have any questions on these, feel free to contact us!

New Technical Webinars

Performance Tuning of HAProxy for Database Load Balancing

09 September 2014 - with Baptiste Assmann of HAProxy Technologies

Do you know what HAProxy can tell you about your application and database instances? Do you know the difference …

The other day, I was discussing high availability (HA) with other people.  The discussion was going in the direction of, as the application was only using INSERT ... ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE (ODKU) and traffic could be replayed, promoting a slave in case of the failure of the master was easy: replaying traffic would make all the slaves converge back to a common state.  It looks as this could work but it might not be as simple.  Before going into the details, let's take a step back and look into HA in general.

tl;dr: be careful when using row-based replication when replicating ODKU as slaves will stop replicating if a row is present on the master and missing on slave (or vice-versa).

High Availability by Promoting a Slave as the new Master
Let's suppose we are working …

August 13, 2014 By Severalnines

New Webinar: Performance Tuning of HAProxy for Database Load Balancing

Date, Time & Registration: 

Tuesday, September 9th @10am CEST (Europe & MEA / Asia Pacific)

Register here

Tuesday, …