If you are automating your infrastructure deployments with Chef, then read on. We are glad to announce the availability of a Chef cookbook for ClusterControl. This cookbook replaces previous cookbooks we released for ClusterControl and Galera Cluster. For those using Puppet, please have a look at our Puppet module for ClusterControl.

ClusterControl Cookbook on Chef Supermarket

The ClusterControl cookbook is available on Chef Supermarket, and getting the cookbook is as easy as:

$ knife cookbook site download clustercontrol

This cookbook supports the installation of ClusterControl on top of existing database clusters:

• Galera Cluster
  • MySQL Galera Cluster by Codership
  …

Thanks to everyone who attended and participated in last week’s webinar on 'Galera Cluster for MySQL vs MySQL (NDB) Cluster: A High Level Comparison'. If you missed the sessions or would like to watch the webinar again & browse through the slides, they are now available online.

In this webinar, Severalnines VP of Products, Alex Yu, who was part of the team at Ericsson who originally developed the NDB storage engine in 2001, gave an overview of the two clustering architectures and discussed their respective strengths and weaknesses: 

1. MySQL Cluster architecture: strengths and limitations
2. Galera Architecture: strengths and limitations
3. Deployment scenarios
4. Data migration
5. Read and write workloads (Optimistic/pessimistic locking)
6. WAN/Geographical replication
7. Schema changes
8. Management and monitoring …

November 14, 2014 By Severalnines

Thanks to everyone who attended and participated in this week's webinar on '9 DevOps Tips for Going in Production with Galera Cluster for MySQL'. If you missed the sessions or would like to watch the webinar again & browse through the slides, they are now available online.

In this webinar, Severalnines CTO Johan Andersson discussed 9 key aspects to consider before taking Galera Cluster for MySQL into production:

• 101 Sanity Check
• Operating System
• Backup Strategies
• Galera Recovery
• Query Performance
• Schema changes
• Security / Encryption
• Reporting
• Protecting from Disasters

Watch the replay 9 DevOps Tips for Going in …

This blog post was inspired by my visit at the annual Zabbix Conference in Riga, Latvia this year, where I gave a couple of talks on MySQL and beyond.

It was a two day single-track event with some 200 participants, a number of interesting talks on Zabbix (and related technologies) and really well-organized evening activities. I was amazed how well organized the event was and hope to be invited to speak there next year as well.   (Just in case you’re not sure what Zabbix is, it is an enterprise-class open source distributed monitoring solution for networks and applications)

I must secretly confess, it was also the first conference …

September 22, 2014 By Severalnines

Need to add phone and SMS alerting to ClusterControl? ClusterControl 1.2.8 introduces support for PagerDuty, an alerting service for Ops teams to schedule on-calls and add phone and SMS notifications to IT tools. By integrating PagerDuty with ClusterControl, you can start receiving phone, SMS and email notifications for all important database events as monitored by ClusterControl. Alerts go directly to the right person who can solve the issue.

This integration is possible thanks to a new plugin interface, that takes ClusterControl alarms in JSON format and outputs to an external system via plugins. Plugins can be either scripts or executable binaries.

We have built a few example …

Disclaimer: I’m not specially an expert of benchmarking, this post is to compare different options. All comments and advices are welcome.

I’m not telling you anything new, the show processlist command is a fantastic command line tool for instant check.
But what about monitor your databases with this command embedded in a tool?

Just have a look at this graph:

With 5K queries per seconds, how much will be hidden with a show processlist executed every seconds? Probably a lot.
So, I wanted to test which alternatives could be efficient to retrieve all the queries during a time lapse.

Test procedure and configuration

I used sysbench 0.5 (with oltp.lua) to make my tests on different configurations and …

August 6, 2014 By Severalnines

Well over a thousand sessions have been submitted for the OpenStack Summit and two of them includes our good selves! We’ve submitted two talks with partners of ours: 

• ClusterControl: Efficient and reliable MySQL Management, Monitoring, and Troubleshooting for OpenStack HA)
• Deploying Databases for OpenStack

… and would love it if the talks were included in the final agenda. For that to happen, we need a few more of your votes today!

The OpenStack Summit is a five-day conference for developers, users, and …

July 22, 2014 By Severalnines

We just wanted to make it official: Severalnines ClusterControl now supports MariaDB 10!

As most of you know will know by now, MariaDB 10 is the newest and most advanced version of the popular MariaDB relational database system. Whilst remaining application-compatible with the MySQL database, it adds many new capabilities to address the most challenging web and enterprise application use cases. Cluster deployments would be based on MariaDB Galera Cluster 10, which is a complete merge of MariaDB 10.0.12 and Galera Cluster. 

ClusterControl for MariaDB Clusters

ClusterControl gives you the power to deploy, manage, monitor and scale entire MariaDB Galera clusters efficiently and …

Now it’s time to setup proper monitoring to avoid unpleasant surprises in future.

There are two major problems the monitoring solves: alerting and trending. Alerting is to notify a responsible person about some major event like service stopped working. Trending is to track the change of something over time – disk or memory usage over time, replication lag etc.

This post will be about alerting with Nagios.

The major problem with most of Nagios setups I’ve seen is excessive amount of false positives. This kills whole idea of monitoring. The matter is when an admin gets a false alert they tend to mute it, explicitly or implicitly. They either filter alerts out or don’t treat them seriously. In general case the alert must be worth to wake up the admin in the middle of the night. If the alert isn’t worth as much the real problem will be ignored sooner or …

Amazon micro instances is the great start option for small websites. Learn how to contain oom-killer that may make wrong decision.

oom-killer as MySQL vs Apache arbiter

When it comes to competition for memory oom-killer steps in. I run Apache and MySQL on the same box. This you should probably never do, but I thought that on my tiny setup they will get along. That’s not true. It started when first users came in. The system ran quickly out of memory:

Feb  5 03:48:26 app-01 kernel: [3313052.688189] httpd invoked oom-killer: gfp_mask=0x201da, order=0, oom_adj=0, oom_score_adj=0
Feb  5 03:48:26 app-01 kernel: [3313052.688203] httpd cpuset=/ mems_allowed=0
Feb  5 03:48:26 app-01 kernel: [3313052.688208] Pid: 21297, comm: httpd Not tainted 3.4.73-64.112.amzn1.x86_64 #1
Feb  5 03:48:26 app-01 kernel: [3313052.688214] Call Trace:
Feb  5 03:48:26 app-01 kernel: [3313052.688226]  [] dump_header.constprop.6+0x7e/0x1b0
Feb  5 03:48:26 app-01 …