I haven't written in a while. Some of the reason is that life has been incredibly busy with two young children. The other reason is that I've been busy at work with my team developing HP Cloud DNS, a service that runs in the cloud, as do the various other applications within the Platform as a Service group that I am part of. After a period of rapid development and deployment, Cloud DNS recently went into private beta . The ability to build an cloud application such as this was primarily that I have a great team (Kiall Mac Innes, Simon McCartney and a great product manger Josh Barry) as well as having chosen the right tools and software solutions. For the deployment side of things, Chef, despite frustrations that I have had before getting my mind around it, was a solution that I knew would make it so we could deploy anywhere, as well as being  [Read more...]

MySQL HA reloaded – old tricks and cool new tools to guarantee high availability to your MySQL Servers by Ivan Zoratti of SkySQL. This talk is a little longer, so check out: HA Reloaded – many ways to provide High Availability. The slides are already online.

Questions to ask: which level of high availability do I need? Do I require no loss of data? Do I need failover or is switchover enough? Can I provide a reasonable service when a component is down? Remember, five nine’s high availability also means a lot of infrastructure costs.

Other things to clarify: availability vs scalability. HA costs. HA for your entire architecture, not just for your database servers. Review your SLAs.

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High Availability is one of the hottest topics for MySQL DBAs. As a matter of fact, when we (SkySQL) are called by users and customers, the top two questions for our PS team are:

How can I make my MySQL database scalable?

How can I make my MySQL database highly available

Since MySQL is the most used online database, these two questions are totally appropriate. Although the two concepts walk together, they should not be confused.

We refer to scalability when we define that a system must sustain a specific workload, measured in different ways – response time, latency, transactions or operations per second to name few, or a combination of them. So, we define the level of scalability we want to achieve and we design a system that can scale to that level.

We refer to high availability when we define

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This blog post shows how you can use the Severalnines Configurator for MySQL Replication to deploy a Multi-master replication setup, and install ClusterControl.
You can also watch videos showing what is described below or read an even more detailed tutorial.

When the deployment is finished you have a set of tools to manage and monitor replication, as well as to add new slaves, and to perform


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Read the detailed replication tutorial instead.


This tutorial shows how you can use the Severalnines Configurator for MySQL Replication to deploy a Multi-master replication setup, and install ClusterControl.

When the deployment is finished you have a set of tools to manage and monitor replication, as well as to add new slaves, and to perform failover.
You can choose:








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So about 4 monts ago there was the crazy idea to start a new FOSS event in Belgium targeted at sysadmins.

What started out as an event for local people to meet local people with some local speakers actually ended up being a small local event with some top international speakers on onfiguration mananagement and system administration mixed with a bunch of good local ones !

I had the honour to open the conference with an extremely short version of the Devops talk I gave earlier last year.. extremely short as I knew that over the course of the weekend the topic would reoccur a lot.

We had the first european talk on Chef, by Joshua Timberman, and we had Puppet talks amongst by Dan Bode from Puppetlabs and CFengine talks , devops was a frequently dropped word,

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There are various setups and solutions to solve the problem of having redundant mysql masters and scaling writes on them. MySQL Cluster can be an alternative. Here is why and how:
Pros:

• No need to worry about DRBD failover and recovery times
• No need to worry about potential data loss when failover from active master to standby master (has all binlog really been replicated over from the failed master?)
• Writes go to any mysql server connected to the Cluster - thus writes are easy to scale
  The data nodes will then send the committed writes to every mysql server with --log-bin enabled.
  

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MySQL HA: 1. Desirable – most of the time, 2. Needed – often enough, 3. Available – there are some good options out there. Typical solutions consist of: Heartbeat with DRBD on Linux. Although HB was introduced to Linux, it can be used on Solaris, FreeBSD and others without the DRBD but with other solutions. Sun Cluster, Veritas (commercial), MySQL Proxy (still in [...]