Kubernetes has been a big trend for a while now, particularly well-suited for microservices. Running your main databases on Kubernetes is probably NOT what you are looking for. However, there’s a niche market for them. My colleague Stephen Thorn did a great job explaining this in The Criticality of a Kubernetes Operator for Databases. If you are considering running your database on Kubernetes, have a look at it first. And, if after reading it you start wondering how the Operator works, Stephen also wrote an Introduction to Percona Kubernetes Operator for Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC), which presents the Kubernetes architecture and how the Percona Operator simplifies the deployment of a …

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: …

Introduction # In this blog, I would like to explore Vitess Operator for Kubernetes. This post demonstrates the sample implementation of Vitess in Kubernetes topology. I also explore common DBA tasks by demonstrating how they are handled in the Vitess ecosystem. Vitess, out of the box, comes with a lot of tools and utilities that one has to either incorporate or develop to manage MySQL topology. Let’s take a look at the capabilities of Vitess in these areas and demonstrate how they are performed under the operator realm.

In my talk on Percona Live (download the presentation), I spoke about how we can use Percona Kubernetes Operators to deploy our own Database-as-Service, based on fully OpenSource components and independent from any particular cloud provider.

Today I want to mention an important tool that I use to test our Operators: ChaosMesh, which actually is part of CNCF and recently became GA version 1.0.

ChaosMesh seeks to deploy chaos engineering experiments in Kubernetes deployments which allows it to test how deployment is resilient against different kinds of failures.

Obviously, this tool is important for Kubernetes Database …

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, …

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 …