We are pleased to announce the general availability of Vitess 14. Major Themes # In this new release, major improvements have been made in several areas of Vitess, including usability and reliability. Online DDL is now GA. Gen4 planner is the new default planner. VTAdmin and VTOrc are officially in beta with Vitess 14. Usability # Command-Line Syntax Deprecation # This release marks the beginning of Vitess standardizing its command-line and flags syntax.

During previous months, I’ve had some time to satisfy my curiosity about databases in containers and I started to test a little bit MySQL in Kubernetes.
This is how it all began…

In January I had the chance to be trained on Kubernetes attending the Docker and Kubernetes essentials Workshop of dbi services. So I decided to prepare a session on this topic at our internal dbi xChange event. And as if by magic, at the same time, a customer asked for our support to migrate a MySQL database to their Kubernetes cluster.

In general, I would like to raise two points before going into …

During previous months, I’ve had some time to satisfy my curiosity about databases in containers and I started to test a little bit MySQL in Kubernetes.
This is how it all began…

In January I had the chance to be trained on Kubernetes attending the Docker and Kubernetes essentials Workshop of dbi services. So I decided to prepare a session on this topic at our internal dbi xChange event. And as if by magic, at the same time, a customer asked for our support to migrate a MySQL database to their Kubernetes cluster.

In general, I would like to raise two points before going into …

Ingress is a resource that is commonly used to expose HTTP(s) services outside of Kubernetes. To have ingress support, you will need an Ingress Controller, which in a nutshell is a proxy. SREs and DevOps love ingress as it provides developers with a self-service to expose their applications. Developers love it as it is simple to use, but at the same time quite flexible.

High-level ingress design looks like this: 

1. Users connect through a single Load Balancer or other Kubernetes service
2. Traffic is routed through Ingress Pod (or Pods for high availability)
   • There are multiple flavors of Ingress Controllers. Some use nginx, some envoy, or other proxies. See a curated list of Ingress Controllers here.
3. Based on HTTP headers traffic is routed …

Last month I performed a review of the Percona Operator for MySQL Server which is still Alpha.  That operator is based on Percona Server for MySQL and uses standard asynchronous replication, with the option to activate semi-synchronous replication to gain higher levels of data consistency between nodes. 

The whole solution is composed as:

Additionally, Orchestrator (https://github.com/openark/orchestrator) is used to manage the topology and the settings to enable on the replica nodes, the semi-synchronous flag if required. While we have not too much to say when using standard Asynchronous replication, I want to write a few words on the needs …

The Vitess maintainers are pleased to announce the general availability of Vitess 13. Major Themes # In this release, Vitess maintainers have made significant progress in several areas, including query serving and cluster management. Compatibility # This release comes with major compatibility improvements. We added support for a large number of character sets and improved our evaluation engine to perform more evaluations at the VTGate level. Gen4 planner is no longer experimental and we have used it to add support for a number of previously unsupported complex queries.

The Vitess maintainers are pleased to announce the general availability of Vitess 13. Major Themes # In this release, Vitess maintainers have made significant progress in several areas, including query serving and cluster management. Compatibility # This release comes with major compatibility improvements. We added support for a large number of character sets and improved our evaluation engine to perform more evaluations at the VTGate level. Gen4 planner is no longer experimental and we have used it to add support for a number of previously unsupported complex queries.

We have a quickstart guide for how to install Percona Distribution for MySQL Operator on minikube. Installing the minimal version works well as it is described in the guide. After that, we will have one HAproxy and one Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) node to work with.

Minikube provides Kubernetes locally. One can try using the provided local k8s to try the more advanced scenarios such as the one described here.

Following that guide, everything works well, until we get to the part of deploying a cluster with

deploy/cr.yaml

Even after that, things seemingly work.

$ kubectl get pods
NAME READY STATUS RESTARTS AGE …

On behalf of the Vitess maintainers, I am pleased to announce the general availability of Vitess 12. Major Themes # In this release, Vitess Maintainers have made significant progress in several areas, including Gen4 planner, VTAdmin, and other improvements. Please take a moment to review the Release Notes. Please read them carefully and report any issues via GitHub. Gen4 Planner # The newest version of the query planner, Gen4, becomes an experimental feature as part of this release.

There are plenty of ways to run ProxySQL in Kubernetes (K8S). For example, we can deploy sidecar containers on the application pods, or run a dedicated ProxySQL service with its own pods.

We are going to discuss the latter approach, which is more likely to be used when dealing with a large number of application pods. Remember each ProxySQL instance runs a number of checks against the database backends. These checks monitor things like server-status and replication lag. Having too many proxies can cause significant overhead.

Creating a Cluster

For the purpose of this example, I am going to deploy a test cluster in GKE. We need to follow these steps:

1. Create a cluster

gcloud container clusters create ivan-cluster --preemptible --project my-project --zone us-central1-c --machine-type n2-standard-4 --num-nodes=3

2. Configure command-line access

gcloud …