Django is a popular framework for Python application developers. It includes packages which make tasks like authorization and content administration easier. Django supports a number of databases including MySQL which makes it possible to run a Django application over Vitess without having to change the application code. Let’s take a look at how to combine the strengths of these two open source frameworks. We built this example using Vitess operator. You can see the details of the implementation in the blog post Vitess Operator for Kubernetes.

Editor’s Note: Because our bloggers have lots of useful tips, every now and then we update and bring forward a popular post from the past. Today’s post was originally published on November 26, 2019.

It’s not uncommon these days for us to use a high availability stack for MySQL consisting of Orchestrator, Consul and ProxySQL. You can read more details about this stack by reading Matthias Crauwels’ blog post How to Autoscale ProxySQL in the Cloud as well as Ivan Groenwold’s post on MySQL High Availability With ProxySQL, Consul and Orchestrator. The high-level concept is simply that Orchestrator will monitor the state of the MySQL replication topology and report changes to Consul which in turn can update ProxySQL hosts using …

Kubernetes operators are meant to simplify the deployment and management of applications. Our Percona Kubernetes Operator for Percona XtraDB Cluster serves the purpose, but also provides users the flexibility to fine-tune their MySQL and proxy services configuration.

The document Changing MySQL Options describes how to provide custom

my.cnf

configuration to the operator. But what would happen if you made a mistake and specified the wrong parameter in the configuration?

Apply Configuration

I already deployed my Percona XtraDB Cluster and deliberately submitted the wrong

my.cnf

  configuration in

cr.yaml

 :

spec:
...
  pxc:
    configuration: | …

Kubernetes has been a big trend for a while now, particularly well-suited for microservices. Running your main databases on Kubernetes is probably NOT what you are looking for. However, there’s a niche market for them. My colleague Stephen Thorn did a great job explaining this in The Criticality of a Kubernetes Operator for Databases. If you are considering running your database on Kubernetes, have a look at it first. And, if after reading it you start wondering how the Operator works, Stephen also wrote an Introduction to Percona Kubernetes Operator for Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC), which presents the Kubernetes architecture and how the Percona Operator simplifies the deployment of a …

Our recent survey showed that many organizations saw unexpected growth around cloud and data. Unexpected bills can become a big problem, especially in such uncertain times. This blog post talks about how Kubernetes scaling capabilities work with Percona Kubernetes Operator for Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC Operator) and can help you to control the bill.

Resources

Kubernetes is a container orchestrator and on top of it, it has great scaling capabilities. Scaling can help you to utilize your cluster better and do not waste money on excessive capacity. But before scaling we need to understand what capacity is and how Kubernetes manages CPU and memory resources.

There are two resource concepts that you should be aware of: …

Introduction # In this blog, I would like to explore Vitess Operator for Kubernetes. This post demonstrates the sample implementation of Vitess in Kubernetes topology. I also explore common DBA tasks by demonstrating how they are handled in the Vitess ecosystem. Vitess, out of the box, comes with a lot of tools and utilities that one has to either incorporate or develop to manage MySQL topology. Let’s take a look at the capabilities of Vitess in these areas and demonstrate how they are performed under the operator realm.

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 …