The microservice architecture is not a new pattern but has become very popular lately for mainly two reasons: cloud computing and containers. That combo helped increase adoption by tackling the two main concerns on every infrastructure: Cost reduction and infrastructure management.

However, all that beauty hides a dark truth:

The hardest part of microservices is the data layer

And that is especially true when it comes to classic relational databases like MySQL. Let’s figure out why that is.

MySQL and the microservice

Following the same two pillars of microservices (cloud computing and containers), what can one do with that in the MySQL space? What do cloud computing and containers bring to the table?

Cloud computing

The magic of the cloud is that it allows you to be cost savvy by letting you easily SCALE UP/SCALE DOWN the size of your instances. No more wasted money on …

The website or mobile app is the storefront for participating in the modern digital era. It’s your portal for inviting users to come and survey your products and services. Much attention focuses on front-end development; this is where the HMTL5, CSS, and JavaScript are coded to develop the landing page that everyone sees when they visit your site.

But the real magic happens on the backend. This is the ecosystem that really powers your website. One writer has articulated this point very nicely as follows:

The technology and programming that “power” a site—what your end user doesn’t see but what makes the site run—is called the back end. Consisting of the server, the database, and the server-side applications, it’s the behind-the-scenes functionality—the brain of a site. …

MySQL continues to be one of the most popular databases used in cloud-native applications. In fact, MySQL is so popular that other cloud databases such as AWS Aurora maintain wire protocol compatibility with MySQL. For SREs and DevOps engineers running MySQL database in production, it is crucial to understand how to monitor MySQL. MySQL poor health can lead to cascading effects on other application components. For example, slow queries can impact page load times for an application, or missing indexes can result in high-latency and application time-outs. By effectively monitoring the performance of databases and query executions, SREs and DevOps can identify if there are bottlenecks in the database tier which affect the overall application performance. With this appreciation for the importance of MySQL monitoring, let us quickly survey what techniques are commonly used for MySQL monitoring and then discuss …