October 9, 2014 By Severalnines

Installing, configuring, deploying databases and performing repetitive administrative tasks are all part of a DBA’s or sysadmin’s job. This can get pretty repetitive and overwhelming if you are part of a centralized IT team, running multiple databases for your organization’s different departments, or a managed hosting provider responsible for setting up and operating databases for external clients. One way to get out of this ‘manual, repetitive task’ business is through a Database as a Service (DBaaS).

DBaaS is a way of delivering database functionality as a service to one or more consumers. A DBaaS platform would provide automated procedures for database deployment, monitoring, backups, recovery/repair, scaling, security/multi-tenancy, etc. This type of automation is especially useful where agility is needed, e.g. for systems that require elasticity by scaling out or scaling back at short …

September 10, 2014 By Severalnines

If you are automating your infrastructure using Puppet, then this blog is for you. We are glad to announce the availability of a Puppet module for ClusterControl. For those using Chef, we already published Chef cookbooks for Galera Cluster and ClusterControl some time back.  

ClusterControl on Puppet Forge

The ClusterControl module initial release is available on Puppet Forge, installing the module is as easy as:

$ puppet module install severalnines-clustercontrol

If you haven’t change the default module path, this module will be installed under /etc/puppet/modules/clustercontrol on …

Join 27,000 others and follow Sean Hull on twitter @hullsean. I was shocked to find this article on ReadWrite: The Truth About DevOps: IT Isn’t Dead; It’s not even Dying. Wait a second, do people really think this? Truth is I have heard whispers of this before. I was at a meetup recently where the […]

Another post on Ansible over on the codecentric blog: Jinja2 for better Ansible playbooks and templates linked here for your convenience :)

August 21, 2014 By Severalnines

MariaDB Galera Cluster involves more effort and resource to administer than standalone MariaDB systems. If you would like to learn how to better manage your MariaDB cluster, then this webinar series is for you. 

We will give you practical advice on how to introduce clusters into your MariaDB / MySQL  environment, automate deployment and make it easier for operational staff to manage and monitor the cluster using ClusterControl.

Language, Date & Time: 

English - Tuesday, September 30th @ 11am CEST: …

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 …

On the company blog I published a post about our experience with Ansible today.

It is no shoot out between different automation tools, but rather a collection of Ansible basics and our experience with it so far. Soon another post will follow about dynamically generated inventories for OpenStack virtual environments.

You can find it here: codecentric blog: Ansible: Simple, yet powerful automation.

June 12, 2014 By Severalnines

We’re delighted to be joining Team MariaDB at SkySQL with a talk on ‘Automation & Management of Database Clusters’ as they tour across several European regions in the coming weeks.

Whether you’re a MariaDB enthusiast or newbie, a MySQL veteran or newbie, or even a MongoDB user who also happens to run MySQL or MariaDB databases: this roadshow is a good place to find out about the latest developments on the MariaDB database as well as related tools and technologies. 

From our own perspective, we’ll be updating participants on how to best automate & manage their database clusters, and demo some of the capabilities of …

March 11, 2014 By Severalnines

For ops folks with multiple environments and instances to manage, a fully programmable infrastructure is the basis for automation. ClusterControl exposes all functionality through a REST API. The web UI also interacts with the REST API to retrieve monitoring data (cluster load, alarms, backup status, etc.) or to send management commands (add/remove nodes, run backups, upgrade a cluster, add/remove load balancer, etc.). The API is written in PHP and runs under Apache. The diagram below illustrates the architecture of ClusterControl.

Figure: ClusterControl - Agentless Architecture

In this blog post, we will show you how to interact directly with the ClusterControl API to retrieve monitoring data or to perform management tasks.

All requests against …

I believe in automation as much as possible, and I'm always working to make the day to day tasks of operations as smooth as possible.  Also I try not to be afraid to take good tools and make them better.

Here in Database Ops at Box, we use pt-kill running as a service to constantly monitor our servers and help protect against long running queries.  But our thresholds are pretty generous, and in some cases it's possible for unforeseen circumstances to cause enough queries to storm the database such that we can have problems before any of them hit the threshold for "busy time."  Ditto for idle connections.

The response is that someone has to be available to manually run another copy of pt-kill with much lower thresholds to clear out these thundering herds.  But what if we could let pt-kill handle both the "normal" mode and still protect us from herds?

That's what we've done by adding a …