One of the most exciting storage-related features in Kubernetes is Volume snapshot and clone. It allows you to take a snapshot of data volume and later to clone into a new volume, which opens a variety of possibilities like instant backups or testing upgrades. This feature also brings Kubernetes deployments close to cloud providers, which allow you to get volume snapshots with one click.

Word of caution: for the database, it still might be required to apply fsfreeze and FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK or

LOCK BINLOG FOR BACKUP

.

It is much easier in MySQL 8 now, because as with atomic DDL, MySQL 8 should provide crash-safe consistent snapshots without additional locking.

Let’s review how we can use this feature with Google Cloud Kubernetes Engine and …

In Percona Kubernetes Operator for Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) versions prior to 1.5.0, there were two methods for upgrading PXC clusters, and both of these use built-in StatefulSet update strategies. The first one is manual (OnDelete update strategy) and the second one is semi-automatic (RollingUpdate strategy). Since the Kubernetes operator is about automating the database management, and there are use cases to always keep the database up to date, a new smart update strategy was implemented.

Smart Update Strategy

The smart update strategy can be used to enable automatic context-aware upgrades of PXC clusters between minor versions. One of the use cases for automatic upgrades is if you want to get security …

On July 21, 2020, Percona delivered an updated version of our Percona Kubernetes Operator for Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) focused on easing deployment and operations management of a clustered MySQL environment. Included in the Percona Distribution for MySQL, our Operator is based on the best practices for MySQL cluster configuration and setup in Kubernetes. This update adds a variety of important new features including:

Smart Update to Safely and Reliably Upgrade your PXC Environment Automatically
We implemented a new update strategy called Smart Update. Smart Update is aware of the context of your environment and minimizes the number of failover events that need to occur to fully upgrade a …

The Percona Kubernetes Operator for Percona XtraDB Cluster can send backups to Amazon S3 or S3-compatible storage. And every now and then at Support, we are asked how to send backups to Google Cloud Storage.

Google Cloud Storage offers an “interoperability mode” which is S3-compatible. However, there are a few details to take care of when using it.

Google Cloud Storage Configuration

First, select “Settings” under “Storage” in the Navigation Menu. Under Settings, select the Interoperability tab. If Interoperability is not yet enabled, click Enable Interoperability Access. This turns on the S3-compatible interface to Google Cloud Storage.

After enabling S3-compatible storage, an access key needs to be generated. There are two options: Access keys can be tied to Service accounts or User accounts. For …

You got yourself a Kubernetes cluster and are now testing our Percona Kubernetes Operator for Percona XtraDB Cluster. Everything is working great and you decided that you want to increase the number of Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) pods from the default 3, to let’s say, 5 pods.

It’s just a matter of running the following command:

kubectl patch pxc cluster1 --type='json' -p='[{"op": "replace", "path": "/spec/pxc/size", "value": 5 }]'

Good, you run the command without issues and now you will have 5 pxc pods! Right? Let’s check out how the pods are being replicated:

kubectl get pods | grep pxc
cluster1-pxc-0                                     1/1     Running   0          25m
cluster1-pxc-1                                     1/1     Running   0          23m
cluster1-pxc-2                                     1/1     Running …

The Percona Kubernetes Operator for Percona XtraDB Cluster(PXC) comes with ProxySQL as part of the deal. And to be honest, the behavior of ProxySQL is pretty much the same as in a regular non-k8s deployment of it. So why bother to write a blog about it? Because what happens around ProxySQL in the context of the operator is actually interesting.

ProxySQL is deployed on its own POD (that can be scaled as well as the PXC Pods can). Each ProxySQL Pod has its own ProxySQL Container and a sidecar container. If you are curious, you can find out which node holds the pod by running

kubectl describe pod cluster1-proxysql-0 | grep Node:
Node: ip-192-168-37-111.ec2.internal/192.168.37.111

Login into and ask for the running containers. You will see something like this:

[root@ip-192-168-37-111 ~]# docker ps | grep -i proxysql …

This session at Percona Live ONLINE was presented by Akshay Suryawanshi, Senior Production Engineer at Shopify, and Jeremy Cole, Senior Staff Production Engineer – Datastores at Shopify.

Shopify is an online and on-premise commerce platform, founded in 2006. Shopify is used by more than a million merchants, and hundreds of billions of dollars of sales have happened on the platform since its inception. The company is a large user of MySQL, and the Black Friday and Cyber Monday weekends are their peak dates during the year, handling hundreds of billions of queries with MySQL. This year’s presentation was an opportunity to talk about the company’s challenges and progress over the last twelve months.

Key Google Cloud concepts from the presentation

As part of the presentation, it’s important to understand the naming conventions that exist around …

In this demo we are setting up InnDB Cluster on Kubernetes, we will use a StatefulSets and NFS as storage. This demo was created on Oracle Cloud (OCI) but vanilla Kubernetes and NFS was used so should work for any cloud or on-prem. More information on my github page here Setup NFS Server to act as your persistent volume. Setup a NFS Server for your persistent volumes, howto here If you are using a public cloud provider you can most likely use dynamic storage options for handling of PV. In bellow examples I have a NFS Server on IP: 10.0.0.50 This NFS exposes folders: …

In this demo we are setting up one MySQL Server using k8s, we will use a deployment and NFS as storage. This demo was created on Oracle Cloud (OCI), standard Kubernetes and NFS was use so the setup should work for any cloud deployment or on-prem. More information on my github page here Persistent volumes Setup a NFS Server for your persistent volumes, howto here If you are using a public cloud provider you can most likely use dynamic storage options for PV. In bellow examples I have a NFS Server on IP: 10.0.0.50 The NFS exposes folder:

• /var/nfs/pv099

…

Long months of the pandemic lockdown have brought to life many great online events enabling the MySQL community to get together and stay informed about the very recent developments and innovations available to MySQL users. It isn’t over yet! Next Thursday, June 4th, Percona & ProxySQL are co-hosting the ProxySQL Tech Talks with Percona virtual meetup covering ProxySQL, MySQL and Percona XtraDB Cluster.

The attendees are invited to participate in the two-hour deep-dive event with plenty of time for questions and answers (we will have two 40-minute sessions + 20 minutes allocated for Q&A). Get prepared, come with your burning questions and true war stories – we’ll have our speakers answer and comment on them! And here come the speakers:

• René Cannaò, ProxySQL author and CEO of ProxySQL …