Recently, I happened to have an onsite engagement and the goal of the engagement was to move a database service to RDS Aurora. Like probably most of you, I knew the service by name but I couldn’t say much about it, so, I Googled, I listened to talks and I read about it. Now that my onsite engagement is over, here’s my first impression of Aurora.

First, let’s describe the service itself. It is part of RDS and, at first glance, very similar to a regular RDS instance. In order to setup an Aurora instance, you go to the RDS console and you either launch a new instance choosing Aurora as type or you create a snapshot of a RDS 5.6 instance and migrate it to Aurora. While with a regular MySQL RDS instance you can create slaves, with Aurora you can add reader nodes to an existing cluster. An Aurora cluster minimally consists of a …

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona XtraBackup 2.3.1-beta1 on May 20th 2015. Downloads are available from our download site here. This BETA release, will be available in Debian testing and CentOS testing repositories.

This is an BETA quality release and it is not intended for production. If you want a high quality, …

MySQL is the database of choice for most OpenStack components (Ceilometer is a notable exception). If you start with a small deployment, it will probably run like a charm. But as soon as the dataset grows, you will suddenly face several challenges. We will write a series of blog posts explaining the issues you may hit and how to overcome them.

Where is MySQL used in OpenStack?

Have a look at the logical diagram of OpenStack below (click the image for a larger view).

The diagram is a bit outdated: Neutron appears as Quantum and newer components like Heat are not pictured. But it shows that a database has to be used to store metadata or runtime information. And although …

OpenStack Trove Day

I just returned from a week in Cambridge, Massachusetts where I was attending the OpenStack Trove Day and the Trove mid-cycle meetup, both sponsored by the great folks at Tesora.

I am relatively new to the OpenStack and Trove arenas so this was a fantastic opportunity for me to learn more about the communities, the various components within OpenStack, and what part Trove plays. I found the entire event very worthwhile – I met a lot of key people in the community, learned more about Trove and its potential, and in general felt a great energy and excitement surrounding Trove and OpenStack as a whole.

There were more than 120 attendees at Trove Day. That is almost four times the initial estimate! I …

OpenStack Trove Day

I just returned from a week in Cambridge, Massachusetts where I was attending the OpenStack Trove Day and the Trove mid-cycle meetup, both sponsored by the great folks at Tesora.

I am relatively new to the OpenStack and Trove arenas so this was a fantastic opportunity for me to learn more about the communities, the various components within OpenStack, and what part Trove plays. I found the entire event very worthwhile – I met a lot of key people in the community, learned more about Trove and its potential, and in general felt a great energy and excitement surrounding Trove and OpenStack as a whole.

There were more than 120 attendees at Trove Day. That is almost four times the initial estimate! I think I …

In a previous post, my colleague Dimitri Vanoverbeke discussed at a high level the concepts of database as a service (DBaaS), OpenStack and OpenStack’s implementation of a DBaaS, Trove. Today I’d like to delve a bit further into Trove and discuss where it fits in, and who benefits.

Just to recap, Trove is OpenStack’s implementation of a database as a service for its cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS). And as the mission statement declares, the Trove project seeks to provide a scalable and reliable cloud database service providing functionality for both relational and non-relational database engines. With the current release of Icehouse, the technology has begun to show maturity providing both stability and a rich feature set.

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Like you all may know, OpenStack is currently one of the coolest open source projects, so I was thrilled when I was asked to manage the deployment of an OpenStack lab for internal Percona use. Starting from basically zero, I created tasks in our Jira and assigned them to a pool of volunteer consultants. As usual in a service company, billing is the priority so I ended up losing the 2 senior guys but fortunately most of my time was with a customer that wasn’t very demanding and I could easily multitask with the project and fill the gap. So, here it goes…

Hardware

To deploy the OpenStack lab we were given 8 similar servers in our Durham, N.C. offices. The specs are:

• CPU: 12 physical cores (24 with HT)
• Disks: 1 sata 4 TB drive and one 480GB SSD drive
• Nics: 2x GbE
• OS: Centos 6

The hardware is recent …

MySQL plays a critical role in OpenStack. It serves as the host database supporting most components such as Nova, Glance, and Keystone and is the most mature guest database in Trove. Many OpenStack operators use Percona open source software including the MySQL drop-in compatible Percona Server and Galera-based Percona XtraDB Cluster as well as tools such as Percona XtraBackup and Percona Toolkit. We see a need in the community to understand how to improve MySQL performance …