Kata containers are containers that use hardware virtualization technologies for workload isolation almost without performance penalties. Top use cases are untrusted workloads and tenant isolation (for example in a shared Kubernetes cluster). This blog post describes how to run Percona Kubernetes Operator for Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC Operator) using Kata containers.

Prepare Your Kubernetes Cluster

Setting up Kata containers and Kubernetes is well documented in the official github repo (cri-o, …

Long months of the pandemic lockdown have brought to life many great online events enabling the MySQL community to get together and stay informed about the very recent developments and innovations available to MySQL users. It isn’t over yet! Next Thursday, June 4th, Percona & ProxySQL are co-hosting the ProxySQL Tech Talks with Percona virtual meetup covering ProxySQL, MySQL and Percona XtraDB Cluster.

The attendees are invited to participate in the two-hour deep-dive event with plenty of time for questions and answers (we will have two 40-minute sessions + 20 minutes allocated for Q&A). Get prepared, come with your burning questions and true war stories – we’ll have our speakers answer and comment on them! And here come the speakers:

• René Cannaò, ProxySQL author and CEO of ProxySQL …

Let’s look at some of the most popular Percona Database Performance Blog posts in 2018.

The closing of a year lends itself to looking back. And making lists. With the Percona Database Performance Blog, Percona staff and leadership work hard to provide the open source community with insights, technical support, predictions and metrics around multiple open source database software technologies. We’ve had nearly 4 million visits to the blog in 2018: thank you! We look forward to providing you with even better articles, news and information in 2019.

As 2018 moves into 2019, let’s take a quick look back at some of the most popular posts on the blog this year.

Top 10 Most Read

These posts had the most number of views (working down from the highest):

Announcing the opening of the Percona Live 2019 Open Source Database Conference call for papers. It will be open from now until January 20, 2019. The Percona Live Open Source Database Conference 2019 takes place May 28-30 in Austin, Texas.

Our theme this year is CONNECT. ACCELERATE. INNOVATE.

As a speaker at Percona Live, you’ll have the opportunity to CONNECT with your peers—open source database experts and enthusiasts who share your commitment to improving knowledge and exchanging ideas. ACCELERATE your projects and career by presenting at the premier open source database event, a great way to build your personal and company brands. And …

Containers are eating the world. If you have built and deployed an application in production over the last few years, the odds are that you have deployed your code in containers. You might have created and deployed individual containers (Docker, Linux LXC, etc.) directly in the beginning, but quickly switched over to a container orchestration technology like Kubernetes (K8s) or Swarm when you needed to coordinate multi-node deployments and high availability (HA). In this container-driven world, what will the future of the application stack look like? Let’s start with what we need from this “future” application stack.

What Do We Need From This Future Application Stack?

1. Cloud Agnostic

   We …

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 …

When deployed through Docker Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) uses environment variables for its configuration

For example, if you want to adjust metrics resolution you can pass

-e METRICS_RESOLUTION=Ns

  as  an option to the

docker run

  command:

docker run -d \
  -p 80:80 \
  --volumes-from pmm-data \
  --name pmm-server \
  --restart always \
  -e METRICS_RESOLUTION=2s \
  percona/pmm-server:latest

You would think if you want to change the setting for existing installation you can just stop the container with

docker stop

  and …

Kubernetes, and its most popular distribution OpenShift, receives a lot of interest as a container orchestration platform. However, databases remain a foreign entity, primarily because of their stateful nature, since container orchestration systems prefer stateless applications. That said, there has been good progress in support for StatefulSet applications and persistent storage, to the extent that it might be already comfortable to have a production database instance running in Kubernetes. With this in mind, we’ve been looking at running Percona XtraDB Cluster in Kubernetes/OpenShift.

While there are already many examples on the Internet of how to start a single MySQL instance in Kubernetes, for serious usage we need to provide:

• High Availability: how can we guarantee availability …

It’s very easy to install Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) on DigitalOcean. If you’ve never used DigitalOcean before, you will find that it is user-friendly and not very expensive. For $5/month you can easily host your PMM on it, letting you monitor your simple infrastructure or try out PMM before implementing it to monitor your production environments.

Let’s prepare the DigitalOcean instance

Log in to DigitalOcean (DO) control panel and click “Create Droplet.”

Thanks to DO you can skip the boring OS setup and save time by using the Docker “One click app” in DO and the Docker image from PMM.

Note: After clicking on “Docker…” choose an instance size that accommodates your budget – PMM can run on as little as the 1GB 1vCPU instance!

Note: Scroll again!

Next step – select a nearby region …

Please join Percona’s Principal Architect Alex Rubin as he presents MySQL, Percona XtraDB Cluster, ProxySQL, Kubernetes: How they work together to give you a highly available cluster database environment on Tuesday, May 29th at 7:00 AM PDT (UTC-7) / 10:00 AM EDT (UTC-4).

Register Now

In this webinar, Alex will discuss how to deploy a highly available MySQL database environment on Kubernetes/Openshift using …