Open Source is a whole-of-process approach to development that can produce high-quality products better tailored to users’ real world needs.  A key reason for this is the early feedback cycle built into that complete process.

Simply publishing something under an Open Source license (while not applying Open Source development processes) does not yield the same quality and other benefits.  So, not all Open Source is the same.

Publishing source of a product “later” (for instance when the monetary benefit has diminished for the company) is meaningless.  In this scenario, there is no “Open Source benefit” to users whatsoever, it’s simply a proprietary product. There is no opportunity for the client to make custom modifications or improvements, or ask a third party to work on such matters – neither is there any third party opportunity to verify and validate either code …

Driven by popularity of previous post about Debian/Ubuntu builds of WebScaleSQL and long discussions during FOSDEM conference this weekend, PSCE engineering team decided to put even more effort into.

We would like to introduce:

• RPM packages available for download
• RedHat/CentOS repository

Architectures covered:

• x86 (32-bit)
• x86_64 (64-bit)

Please note that “WebScaleSQL does not currently maintain compatibility for anything except GNU/Linux x86_64.” (WebScaleSQL FAQ)”

RedHat/CentOS releases:

• CentOS 6
• CentOS 7

Packages can be downloaded from …

November 7, 2014 By Severalnines

PrestaShop is a popular open source e-commerce software powering over 200,000 online stores, according to the company. We’ve seen a bit of interest into high availability PrestaShop setups, so this post will show you how to achieve that on multiple servers. Note that this setup not only caters for failures, but by load balancing traffic across multiple servers, it also allows the system to scale and handle more users.

This post is similar to our previous posts on web application scalability and high availability:

• Magento - nginx, MySQL Galera Cluster, OCFS2
• Drupal - Apache, MySQL Galera Cluster, csync2 with …

October 27, 2014 By Severalnines

The term data warehousing often brings to mind things like large complex projects, big businesses, proprietary hardware and expensive software licenses. With Hadoop came open source data analysis software that ran on commodity hardware, this helped address at least some of the cost aspects. We had previously blogged about MongoDB and MySQL to Hadoop. But setting up and maintaining a Hadoop infrastructure might still be out of reach for small businesses or small projects with limited budgets. Well, perhaps then you might want to have a look at Redshift.

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September 3, 2014 By Severalnines

Running your database cluster on AWS is a great way to adapt to changing workloads by adding/removing instances, or by scaling up/down each instance. At Severalnines, we talk much more about scale-out than scale up, but there are cases where you might want to scale up an instance instead of scaling out. 

In this post, we’ll show you how to change instance sizes with respect to RAM, CPU and IOPS, and how to tune your Galera nodes accordingly. Moreover, this post assumes that instances are launched using Amazon VPC.

When do we need to upgrade an instance?

You typically need to upgrade an instance when you run out of server resources. This includes CPU, RAM, storage capacity, disk throughput and bandwidth. You must allow enough headroom for …

July 2, 2013 By Severalnines

Joomla! is estimated to be the second most used CMS on the internet after WordPress, with users like eBay, IKEA, Sony, McDonald’s and Pizza Hut. In this post, we will describe how to scale Joomla on multiple servers. This architecture not only allows the CMS to handle more users, by load-balancing traffic across multiple servers. It also brings high availability by providing fail-over between servers.

This post is similar to our previous posts on web application scalability and high availability:

• Drupal - Apache, MySQL Galera Cluster, csync2 with lsyncd
• Wordpress - Apache, Percona XtraDB Cluster, …

June 11, 2013 By Severalnines

Over the years, WordPress has evolved from a simple blogging platform to a CMS. Over seven million sites use it today, including the likes of CNN, Forbes, The New York Times and eBay. So, how do you scale Wordpress on multiple servers for high performance? 

This post is similar to our previous post on Drupal, Scaling Drupal on Multiple Servers with Galera Cluster for MySQL but we will focus on Wordpress, Percona XtraDB Cluster and GlusterFS using Debian Squeeze 64bit.

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Last week we ran a live webinar presenting the new MySQL Web Reference Architectures, a set of documented and repeatable best practices for building highly available, scaleable and secure database infrastructure to power new generations of web and mobile services.

The webinar replay is now available on-demand so you can listen in from the comfort of your own desk…or commute.

As a taster - we discuss sizing and design patterns - you can see a sample below:

We received some great questions during the Q&A session which I felt would be useful to you, so I've included them …

MySQL 5.6 reached GA (General Availability) today and is packed with a wealth of new features and capabilities.  Exciting stuff!
MySQL 5.6 also introduces the largest set of enhancements to replication ever delivered in a single release, including: - 5x higher performance to improve consistency across a cluster and reduce the risks of data loss in the event of a master failing - Self-healing clusters with automatic failover and recovery from outages or planned maintenance - Assured data integrity with checksums implemented across the replication workflow - DevOps automation
Of course, getting started with all of these enhancements can be a challenge - whether you are new to MySQL replication or an experienced user. So two new Guides are available to help take advantage of everything replication offers in MySQL 5.6.
…

Using MySQL replication gives you an opportunity to scale out read queries. However, MySQL replication is asynchronous; the slave may fall behind.

This Wednesday, January 23 2013, I'll be presenting a free webinar about using MySQL replication on busy PHP web sites.  Register here:  http://www.percona.com/webinars/readwrite-splitting-mysql-and-php

Applications have variable tolerance