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: …

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, …

Percona Live Online Agenda Slot: Wed 21 Oct • New York 4:30 a.m. • London 9:30 a.m • New Delhi 2:00 p.m. • Singapore 4:30 p.m.

Abstract

Starting with AWS, the major cloud providers offer different options to run a MySQL or a MySQL-compatible database on the cloud. A new approach is to rely on so-called serverless (relational) databases like Aurora Serverless that offer both traditional TCP connections and HTTP API access. Can serverless really be the future? Can data API really replace a MySQL connector? What are the major limitations of a serverless database cluster and do they really protect from inefficient use of database resources?

Why is your talk exciting?

The database is the most challenging layer to optimize resources in the cloud and achieve elasticity. Serverless relational databases can help in that but …

PMM (Percona Monitoring and Management) is a great community tool for monitoring your OSDB (MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB) fleet. It’s feature rich, and it’s built and distributed as open-source based on several de-facto industry standard tools such as Grafana and Prometheus. In the second half of last year, major version 2 was released and whereas the major components remained mostly the same, some significant architectural changes were made, but this is out-of-scope for this post.

Upgrading to PMM2 is basically the same as starting from scratch with a fresh install; it requires re-adding all your servers, which can be a painful process if you have a large fleet of instances. For servers where you have OS level access, you can just install the PMM2 agent, but for RDS there is no access to the OS so another approach is required. In this blog, I will focus on getting a large number of RDS instances added.

Adding RDS instances …

Amazon RDS for MySQL uses many default values for system variables, but it also sets a few “sys vars” with different values. As with any database, neither product (MySQL) nor provider (AWS) defaults can best suite all use cases. It’s our responsibility to carefully review and set every important system variable. This is tedious and difficult, but I’ve done it for you.

Below are are 21 MySQL 5.7 system variables that I recommend changing by creating a new parameter group. This presumes new RDS instances; some of these sys vars cannot be changed easily after provisioning MySQL. This only applies to RDS for MySQL, not Amazon Aurora.

Amazon RDS for MySQL uses many default values for system variables, but it also sets a few “sys vars” with different values. As with any database, neither product (MySQL) nor provider (AWS) defaults can best suite all use cases. It’s our responsibility to carefully review and set every important system variable. This is tedious and difficult, but I’ve done it for you. Below are are 21 MySQL 5.7 system variables that I recommend changing by creating a new parameter group.

Would you play a multiplayer game if you discovered other people are cheating? According to a survey by Irdeto, 60% of online games were negatively impacted by cheaters, and 77% of players said they would stop playing a multiplayer game if they think opponents are cheating. Player churn grows as cheating grows.

Stopping this is therefore essential if you want to build and develop your community, which is essential to success for today’s gaming companies. This session at Percona Live ONLINE was presented by Yahav Biran, specialist solutions architect, gaming technologies at Amazon Web Services, and Yoav Eilat, Senior Product Manager at Amazon Web Services, presented a talk and demonstration about anti-cheating tools in gaming based on using automation and machine learning (ML).

Yoav notes that while people might think of ML in terms of text or images, but: …

How to build a multi-region, multi-master MySQL cloud database back-end capable of serving a global high volume cloud contact center

This global SaaS provider is a Cloud Contact Center solution provider (the leading Salesforce telephony solution), who needed to deliver up-to-date data to clients as quickly as possible. Its cloud-based call center software frees users to make every conversation personal; it supports the creation of exceptional customer experiences that help serve better and sell more. Its technology is 100% cloud-based and device-agnostic for telephony infrastructure.

What is the Challenge?

Active/Active (multi-master) MySQL clustering is needed when there is significant update load on geographically distributed applications. These require fast response times both for updates and reads, and they also need to share data on a global scale.

• Regional distribution of data
• Deliver …

At re:Invent in Las Vegas in December 2019, AWS announced the public preview of RDS Proxy, a fully managed database proxy that sits between your application and RDS. The new service offers to “share established database connections, improving database efficiency and application scalability”.

But one of the benefits that caught my eye is the ability to reduce the downtime in case of an instance failure and a failover. As for the announcement:

In case of a failure, RDS Proxy automatically connects to a standby database instance while preserving connections from your application and reduces failover times for RDS and Aurora multi-AZ databases by up to 66%”

You can read more about the announcement and the new service on the AWS …

I have published enough Debezium MySQL connector tutorials for taking snapshots from Read Replica. To continue my research I wanted to do something for AWS RDS Aurora as well. But aurora is not using binlog bases replication. So we can’t use the list of tutorials that I published already. In Aurora, we can get the binlog file name and its position from its snapshot of the source Cluster. So I used a snapshot for loading the historical data, and once it’s loaded we can resume the CDC from the main cluster.

Requirements:

1. Running aurora cluster.
2. Aurora cluster must have binlogs enabled.
3. Make binlog retention period to a minimum 3 days(its a best practice).
4. Debezium connector should be able to access both the clusters.
5. Make sure you have different security …