In the context of providing managed WordPress hosting services, at Presslabs we operate with lots of small to medium-sized databases, in a DB-per-service model, as we call it. The workloads are mostly reads, so we need to efficiently scale that. The MySQL® asynchronous replication model fits the bill very well, allowing us to scale horizontally from one server—with the obvious availability pitfalls—to tens of nodes. The next release of the stack is going to be open-sourced.

As we were already using Kubernetes, we were looking for an operator that could automate our DB deployments and auto-scaling. Those available were doing synchronous replication using MySQL group replication or Galera-based replication. Therefore, we decided to write our own operator.

Solution architecture

The …