In my talk on Percona Live (download the presentation), I spoke about how we can use Percona Kubernetes Operators to deploy our own Database-as-Service, based on fully OpenSource components and independent from any particular cloud provider.

Today I want to mention an important tool that I use to test our Operators: ChaosMesh, which actually is part of CNCF and recently became GA version 1.0.

ChaosMesh seeks to deploy chaos engineering experiments in Kubernetes deployments which allows it to test how deployment is resilient against different kinds of failures.

Obviously, this tool is important for Kubernetes Database …

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, …

In a perfect world, we expect all software to run flawlessly and never have problems such as bugs and crashes. We also know that this perfect world doesn’t exist and we better be as prepared as possible to troubleshoot those types of situations. Historically, generating core dumps has been a task delegated to the kernel. If you are curious about how to enable it via Linux kernel, you can check out Getting MySQL Core file on Linux. There are a few drawbacks that pose either a limitation or a huge strain to get it working, such as:

• System-wide configuration required. This is not something DBA always has access to.
• Inability or very difficult to enable it for a specific binary only. Standards ways enable it for every software running on the box.
• Nowadays, with cloud and containers, this task has become even …

If you often deploy services in the cloud, you certainly, at least once, forgot to stop a test instance. I am like you and I forgot my share of these. Another mistake I do once in a while is to provision a bigger instance than needed, just in case, and forget to downsize it. While this is true for compute instances, it is especially true for database instances. Over time, this situation ends up adding a cost premium. In this post, we’ll discuss a solution to mitigate these extra costs, the use of the RDS Aurora Serverless service.

What is Amazon Aurora Serverless?

Since last spring, Amazon unveiled a new database related product: RDS Aurora Serverless. The aim of this new product is to simplify the management around Aurora clusters. It brings a likely benefit for the end users, better control over cost. Here are some …

One of the most exciting storage-related features in Kubernetes is Volume snapshot and clone. It allows you to take a snapshot of data volume and later to clone into a new volume, which opens a variety of possibilities like instant backups or testing upgrades. This feature also brings Kubernetes deployments close to cloud providers, which allow you to get volume snapshots with one click.

Word of caution: for the database, it still might be required to apply fsfreeze and FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK or

LOCK BINLOG FOR BACKUP

.

It is much easier in MySQL 8 now, because as with atomic DDL, MySQL 8 should provide crash-safe consistent snapshots without additional locking.

Let’s review how we can use this feature with Google Cloud Kubernetes Engine and …

Google Cloud Platform (GCP), with its CloudSQL offering, has become a leading platform for database-as-a-service workload deployments for many organizations. Scale and High Availability have surfaced as primary goals for many of these deployments. Unfortunately, the attainment of these objectives has been challenging.

Often, the answer has been to simply add more CloudSQL databases. Many, however, have found a better solution in Percona’s fully managed MySQL environment based in Google’s GCE. Percona’s fully managed MySQL offering provides benefits similar to CloudSQL, plus the ability to run MySQL with an unlimited number of tables and much more reliable database availability. This has empowered these organizations to reclaim control over their architecture decisions. With Percona’s fully managed MySQL, your database architecture choices are once again based on your needs and the needs of your workload, rather than the capabilities …

For what reason should I use a real multi-primary setup?

To be clear, not a multi-writer solution where any node can become the active writer in case of needs, as for Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) or Percona Server for MySQL using Group_replication. No, we are talking about a multi-primary setup where I can write at the same time on multiple nodes. I want to insist on this “why?”.

After having excluded the possible solutions mentioned above, both covering the famous 99.995% availability, which is 26.30 minutes of downtime in a year, what is left?

Disaster Recovery? Well, that is something I would love to have, but to be a real DR solution we need to put several kilometers (miles for imperial) in the middle.

And we know …

If you have a New Relic Infrastructure Pro license, and unmonitored MySQL servers, there’s now an easy solution at your fingertips. With the New Relic MySQL integration you can monitor and graph almost any detailed metric you could possibly want. New Relic recently unified its analytics tools with New Relic One, a dashboard that provides quick access to all the New Relic tools. With an Infrastructure Pro subscription, you get access to:

• New Relic Infrastructure: Flexible, dynamic monitoring of your entire infrastructure, from services running in the cloud or on dedicated hosts, to containers running in orchestrated environments.
• New Relic Alerts: A flexible, centralized notification system that unlocks the operational potential of New Relic. Alerts is a single tool to manage alert policies and alert conditions for all of your New Relic data.
…

This post was first published on Oracle MySQL Blog.

If you are running MySQL on premise, it’s maybe the right time to think about migrating your lovely MySQL database somewhere where the MySQL Team prepared a comfortable place for it to stay running and safe.

This awesome place is MySQL Database Service in OCI. For more information about what MDS is and what it provides, please check this blog from my colleague Airton Lastori.

One important word that should come to your mind when we talk about MDS is SECURITY !

Therefore, MDS endpoint can only be a private IP in OCI. This means you won’t be able to expose your MySQL …

During the MDS webinar on how to deploy WordPress on OCI using MDS (slides & video), I briefly explained how to deploy the full architecture on OCI using Resource Manager and Stacks.

The Stack for that architecture is now available on my github: https://github.com/lefred/oci-wordpress-mds/releases/tag/0.0.1

To deploy it, it’s very easy. In OCI’s Dashboard, go on “Resource Manager” and then choose “Stacks“:

Create a new stack and just drop the …