Here at Pythian we get a lot of exposure to new technologies and implementation strategies via the work we do internally and for our clients. The most noteworthy technology stack that I’ve seen get a lot of traction in the MySQL community recently is the high availability stack including Orchestrator, Consul and ProxySQL. 

I won’t dive too deeply into the details of this implementation as there are several blog posts that our team has submitted on this topic, but the key thing I want you to keep in mind for this particular topic is the usage of Consul as a “source of truth” for the state of your MySQL replication clusters. If Orchestrator or its adjacent scripts are running as expected, Consul should always have the latest information pertaining to the state of your cluster. This is incredibly valuable. In fact, …

In this post, we will explore one approach to MySQL high availability with ProxySQL, Consul and Orchestrator.

This is a follow up to my previous post about a similar architecture but using HAProxy instead. I’ve re-used some of the content from that post so that you don’t have to go read through that one, and have everything you need in here.

Let’s briefly go over each piece of the puzzle:

– ProxySQL is in charge of connecting the application to the appropriate backend (reader or writer).

It can be installed on each application server directly or we can have an intermediate connection layer with one or more ProxySQL servers. The former probably makes sense if you have a small number of application servers; as the number grows, the latter option becomes more attractive. Another scenario for the …

Introduction

In this post we will explore one approach to MySQL high availability with HAProxy, Consul and Orchestrator.
Let’s briefly go over each piece of the puzzle first:
– HAProxy is usually installed on the application servers or an intermediate connection layer, and is in charge of connecting the application to the appropriate backend (reader or writer). The most common deployment I’ve seen is to have separate ports for writes (which are routed to the master) and reads (which are load balanced over a pool of slaves).
– Orchestrator’s role is to monitor the topology and perform auto recovery as needed.
The key piece here is how we can make HAProxy aware that a topology change has happened, and the answer lies within Consul (and Consul templates).
– Consul is meant to be told the identity of the new master by Orchestrator. By leveraging Consul templates, we can then in turn propagate that …

Welcome to another post in our series of interview blogs for the upcoming Percona Live Europe 2017 in Dublin. This series highlights a number of talks that will be at the conference and gives a short preview of what attendees can expect to learn from the presenter.

This blog post is with Avraham Apelbaum, DBA and DevOps at Wix.com His talk is titled Orchestrating ProxySQL with Orchestrator and Consul. The combination of ProxySQL and Orchestrator solves many problems, but still requires some manual labor when the configuration changes when there is a network split (and other scenarios). In our …

In this blog post, I’ll provide my thoughts about Consul for ProxySQL service discovery and automation.

I approached Consul recently while looking for a service discovery and configuration automation solution for ProxySQL. My colleague Nik Vyzas wrote a great post on this topic, and I suggest you read it. I wrote this article to share my first impressions of Consul (for whomever it might interest).

Consul is a complete service discovery solution. In this respect it differs from its alternative etcd, which only provides a foundation to build such solutions.

Consul consists of a single, small binary (the Linux binary is 24MB). You just download it, edit the configuration file and start the program. It doesn’t …

When it comes to “decision time” about which type of MySQL HA (high-availability) solution to implement, and how to architect the solution, many questions come to mind. The most important questions are:

• “What are the best tools to provide HA and Load Balancing?”
• “Should I be deploying this proxy tool on my application servers or on a standalone server?”.

Ultimately, the best tool really depends on the needs of your application and your environment. You might already be using specific tools such as Consul or MHA, or you might be looking to implement tools that provide richer features. The dilemma of deploying a proxy instance per application host versus a standalone proxy instance is usually a trade-off between “a less effective load balancing algorithm” or “a single point of failure.” Neither are desirable, but there are ways to implement a solution that balances all …

Introducing Consul

I’m always interested in what Mitchell Hashimoto and Hashicorp are up to, I typically find their projects valuable.  If you’ve heard of Vagrant, you know their work.

I recently became interested in a newer project they have called ‘Consul‘.  Consul is a bit hard to describe.  It is (in part):

• Highly consistent metadata store (a bit like Zookeeeper)
• A monitoring system (lightweight Nagios)
• A service discovery system, both DNS and HTTP-based. (think of something like haproxy, but instead of tcp load balancing, it provides dns lookups with healthy services)

What this has to do with Percona XtraDB Cluster

I’ve had some more complex testing for  …