Amazon EC2 and cloud computing offer great promise for startups to ramp up their online presence quickly.  Navigate those challenges with an strong partner.  We bring 20 years experience to the table with each new client.

• Scaling Web Applications
• MySQL High Availability in Amazon EC2
• Amazon Multi-AZ Deployments
• Amazon RDS Deployments
• Migrating to Amazon EC2
• Migrating to MySQL
• Managing Backups and Disaster Recovery in the Cloud
• Horizontal Scalability of MySQL on EC2
• Horizontal Scalability on Cloud Hosted Servers
• Evaluating Cloud Providers
• Evaluating MySQL Distributions and Platforms
• Strong Customer Facing Skills
• Integrate Directly with Development Team
• Agile …

1. Backup outside of the Cloud

Some of the high profile companies affected by Amazon's April 2011 outage could have recovered had they kept a backup of their entire site outside of the cloud.  With any hosting provider, managed traditional data center or cloud provider, alternate backups are always a good idea.  A MySQL logical backup and/or incremental backup can be copied regularly offsite or to an alternate cloud provider.  That's real insurance!

2. Use alternate regions and availability zones

Amazon's outage in April …

I have published "MySQL MHA" that fully automates MySQL master failover. You can also get commercial support from SkySQL. Let's try MHA today!


Today I'm happy to announce that I have released MySQL-MHA: MySQL Master High Availability manager and tools as an open source software (GPL v2 license). The below is a part of documentation of MHA. I'm glad if you are interested in MHA.

A primary objective of MHA is automating master failover and slave promotion within short (usually 10-30 seconds) downtime, without suffering from replication consistency problems, without spending money for lots of new servers, without …

After quite a bit of work, we have now finally released our High Availability for MySQL training course. This course focuses on the different ways of achieving high availability for MySQL servers. When creating the course we had to study a wide range of different options to see what we would include as a possible solution to the course. The course will cover the usual suspects such as standard MySQL replication (including the semi-synch mode), MySQL Cluster, disk-clustering and DRBD which has long been used together with MySQL. We also cover some more unorthodox HA solutions for MySQL, such as Schoner Active Clustering, Continuent Tungsten etc.
To learn more or to register for one of our High Availability classes, please visit our training page

HA Provided by OVM

Join us for a webinar this Wednesday (13th July) to understand more about the benefits of using the new Oracle VM Template for MySQL Enterprise Edition as well as how to get started with it. As always the webinar is free but please register here. The webinar starts at 9:00 am Pacific (5:00 pm UK, 6:00 pm CET) and even if you can’t make that time register anyway and you’ll be sent a link to the charts and replay.

As a reminder, a new white paper is available that goes through some of the details – if you have time then take a look at this paper before the webinar and then get any of your questions answered. …

HA Provided by OVM

A new white paper is available that steps you though the benefits and the use of the Oracle VM Template for MySQL Enterprise Edition (also see yesterday’s press announcement). Get the white paper here.

As a reminder Oracle Virtual Manager provides a way to add High Availability to your MySQL deployment (this is separate from MySQL Replication and MySQL Cluster). The new OVM template provides a very convenient way to create one or more Virtual Machines that come pre-provisioned with OVM, Oracle Linux and MySQL Enterprise Edition as well as the scripts required to integrate MySQL …

Oracle VM Template for MySQL Enterprise Edition

Oracle today announced the release of the “Oracle VM Template for MySQL Enterprise Edition” – you can read the press-release here.

There are a couple of ways to look at the benefits:

• Provides a simple alternate High Availability solution for MySQL (i.e. rather than MySQL Replication or MySQL Cluster – although you can still set up replication to/from a MySQL Server installed this way)
• A new, very simple way to get up and running with MySQL Enterprise – running on a complete stack that Oracle can provide support for

As the focus of this blog is normally MySQL Cluster and Replication, the HA attributes of this solution are probably those …

I was at a conference recently talking with a Major Cloud Hosting Provider and mentioned that for database servers, I really want large instances, quite a bit larger than the largest I can get now. The lack of cloud servers with lots of memory, many fast cores, and fast I/O and network performance leads to premature sharding, which is costly. A large number of applications can currently run on a single real server, but would require sharding to run in any of the popular cloud providers’ environments. And many of those applications aren’t growing rapidly, so by the time they outgrow today’s hardware we can pretty much count on simply upgrading and staying on a single machine.

The person I was talking to actually seemed to become angry at me, and basically called me an idiot. This person’s opinion is that no one should be running on anything larger than 4GB of memory, and anyone who doesn’t build their system to be sharded …

I am not a fan of the MMM tool for managing MySQL replication. This is a topic of vigorous debate among different people, and even within Percona not everyone feels the same way, which is why I’m posting it here instead of on an official Percona blog. There is room for legitimate differences of opinion, and my opinion is just my opinion. Nonetheless, I think it’s important to share, because a lot of people think of MMM as a high availability tool, and that’s not a decision to take lightly. At some point I just have to step off the treadmill and write a blog post to create awareness of what I see as a really bad situation that needs to be stopped.

I like software that is well documented and formally tested. A lot of software is usable even if it isn’t created by perfectionists. But there are two major things in the MySQL world for which I think we can all agree we need strong guarantees of correctness. One is backups. The other is …

This post is the fifth of a series that started here.

From the previous posts of this series, we now have nearly everything setup, only a few pieces are missing. One of the missing pieces is the Pacemaker script that run on the MySQL instance.

First, this script is optional, Pacemaker will accept a noop bash script but since we have the opportunity to run a script on the MySQL host, let’s take it. At minimum, let’s use mysqladmin to ping the database to see if it is available. If not, the recommended action is to stop the heartbeat service (pacemaker). Stopping Pacemaker will trigger a resource transfer to the monitoring instance which will in turn cause the running MySQL instance to be killed and a new one started. Here is a simple instance script, more complex ones are …