Starting with Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) 8.0, replication traffic encryption is enabled by default. That said, it’s common to find clusters running without TLS that suddenly need it: a new compliance requirement, an audit finding, a network segment that is no longer considered trusted.
PXC has a variable for exactly that case, pxc-encrypt-cluster-traffic, which handles SSL encryption for inter-node traffic, including State Snapshot Transfer (SST), Incremental State Transfer (IST), and the group communication the nodes use for replication.
The variable is not dynamic, and turning it on normally costs a full cluster restart since the node that encrypts traffic listens on ssl:// while its peers are still on tcp://. If a node joins the cluster with TLS enabled while remaining nodes don’t, the restarting node fails to reach out to the other peers with the following error:
2026-09-02T02:16:02.359992Z 0 [Note] [MY-000000] …[Read more]