Just when we thought that IT and cloud terminology couldn’t get any more confusing, a new term was coined to seemingly simplify it all: hybrid cloud.

As is often the case, one cloud doesn’t fit all, and over the past few years, IT teams around the globe have realized that combining the capabilities of various public clouds (aka multi-cloud) with on-premises private clouds (aka hybrid cloud) enables organizations to tailor their technology environments to match their business drivers more effectively.

In fact, many predicted in 2019 that hybrid cloud would be the future (as opposed to multi-cloud) and it is increasingly looking that way.

“2019 will be the year cloud customers start to abandon the notion of multi-cloud and anchor on a hybrid-cloud future involving a mix of on-premise services, often enabled or augmented by services from their preferred cloud provider, and managed cloud services.” – …

Last week I completed the Continuent Tungsten Solutions Training in London!

I spent two full days with eight of our customers and our host Chris Parker, one of Continuent’s Customer Success Directors, listening and learning, doing exercises, and getting to know a range of DBAs and System Engineers working in industries like telecom and e-commerce!

Chris did an incredible job guiding us and fielding questions on MySQL database management with Tungsten Clustering – I feel so lucky I got to do this – it was so fun!!

First we went through an install of a simple three-node cluster using allotted AWS ec2 instances. We created the directories and database users and got the Tungsten …

Our team has continued to pave the way for Continuous MySQL Operations this year with our Continuent Tungsten products: Tungsten Clustering and Tungsten Replicator.

And we’d like to take this opportunity to thank you all – our customers, partners, followers and colleagues – for your support in 2019, and celebrate some of our successes with you…

2019 Continuent Momentum Highlights

• Launched three new Tungsten Clustering & Tungsten Replicator releases
• Introduced the new Tungsten Replicator (AMI) on the Amazon Marketplace
• Were named a 2020 Top Trending Product by Database Trends & Applications Magazine

2019 Continuent Customer Highlights

• 100%: Customer Satisfaction during the most recent customer survey
• 97.5%: our …

Zero Downtime SaaS Provider — How to Easily Deploy MySQL Clusters in AWS and Recover from Multi-Zone AWS Outages

This is the second post in a series of blogs in which we cover a number of different Continuent Tungsten customer use cases that center around achieving continuous MySQL operations with commercial-grade high availability (HA), geographically redundant disaster recovery (DR) and global scaling – and how we help our customers achieve this.

This use case looks at a multi-year (since 2012) Continent customer who is a large Florida-based SaaS provider dealing with sensitive (HIPAA Compliant) medical data, which offers electronic health records, practice management, revenue cycle management and data analytics for thousands of doctors.

What is the Challenge?

Lack of high availability in AWS. The challenge they were facing came from using AWS, which allowed them to rapidly provision database and …

We’re delighted to be able to share that Tungsten Clustering – our flagship product – is named in the DBTA 2020 List of Trend Setting Products!

Congratulations to all the products and their teams that were named in the 2020 list.

We have been at the forefront of the market need since 2004 with our solutions for platform agnostic, highly available, globally scaling, clustered MySQL databases that are driving businesses to the cloud (whether hybrid or not) today; and our software solutions are the expression of that.

Tungsten Clustering allows enterprises running business-critical MySQL database applications to cost-effectively …

Overview

Over the past few days we have been working with a number of customers on the best way to handle Triggers within their MySQL environment when combined with Tungsten Replicator. We looked at situations where Tungsten Replicator was either part of a Tungsten Clustering installation or a standalone replication pipeline.

This blog dives head first into the minefield of Triggers and Replication.

Summary and Recommendations

The conclusion was that there is no easy one-answer-fits-all solution – It really depends on the complexity of your environment and the amount of flexibility you have in being able to adjust. Our top level summary and recommendations are as follows:

If using Tungsten Clustering and you need to use Triggers:

• Switch to …

Geo-scale MySQL – or how to build a global, multi-region MySQL cloud back-end capable of serving several hundred million player accounts

This blog introduces a series of blogs we’ll be publishing over the next few months that discuss a number of different customer use cases that our solutions support and that centre around achieving continuous MySQL operations with commercial-grade high availability (HA), geographically redundant disaster recovery (DR) and global scaling.

This first use case looks at a customer of ours who are a global gaming company with several hundred million world-wide player accounts.

What is the challenge?

How to reliably, and fast, cater to hundreds of millions of game players around the world? The challenge here is to serve a game application for a geographically-distributed audience; in other words, a pretty unique challenge.

It requires fast, local response times …

Those who build SaaS know that you’re actually providing an experience. You’re building long-term relationships and aiming for recurring revenue. Therefore, your product must be flexible, resilient, and consistent.

Many companies find it hard to take time, acquire the right ingredients, and design truly great software from the bottom-up. This is understandable given how fast the SaaS industry moves.

But firstly, who am I to be talking about this subject? My education was in Economics and Complex Systems, and I’ve been fortunate to gain exposure to various IT trends and tools working almost a decade mostly in Tech. I started interviewing customers at Continuent (majority SaaS) over five years ago, and I have listened to a number of …

We’re happy to announce that our white paper ‘Tungsten Clustering – Benefits & Configurations’ for MySQL, MariaDB and Percona Server is available to read on our website.

Tungsten Clustering is a one-of-a-kind software solution that provides clustering, disaster recovery and high availability for MySQL, MariaDB & Percona Server databases.

It allows enterprises running business-critical database applications to cost-effectively achieve continuous operations on a global scale with:

• Commercial-grade high availability (HA)
• Geographically redundant disaster recovery (DR)
• Global operations with geographically distributed multi-master

…

Continuent is pleased to announce that the following new software releases are now available:

• Tungsten Clustering version 5.4.0
• Tungsten Replicator version 5.4.0

Releases 5.4.0 is significant in that it introduces MySQL 8 support, along with many new features, stability improvements and bug fixes.

Highlights common to both products:

Improvements, new features and functionality

• Two new utility scripts have been added to the release to help with setting the Replicator position:
  • tungsten_find_position, which assists with locating information in the THL based on the provided MySQL binary log event position and outputs a dsctl set …