Galera Cluster partner

OptimaData is a consulting, support and reseller partner of Codership, the builder and developer of Galera Cluster. Codership uses different Galera distributions for clustering MySQL, MariaDB but also Percona XtraDB. Of course in the different versions of MySQL and MariaDB.

Recently, Codership released Galera Manager 1.0 so that anyone can easily deploy their Galera clusters within an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) environment.

Galera Cluster is a synchronous multi-master database cluster based on synchronous replication and MySQL and InnoDB. When Galera Cluster is in use, database reads and writes can be sent to each node. Each individual node can be lost without interrupting operations and without using complex failover procedures.

High level Galera Cluster consists of a database server (i.e. MySQL or MariaDB) that uses the Galera Replication Plugin to manage replication. To be more specific, the MySQL replication plugin API has been extended to provide all the information and hooks needed to provide true multi-master, synchronous replication. This extended API is called the Write-Set Replication API, or wsrep API.

Through the wsrep API, Galera Cluster provides certification-based replication. A transaction for replication, the write set contains not only the database rows to replicate, but also information about all locks that were held by the database during the transaction. Each node then certifies the replicated write-set against other write-sets in the applier’s queue. The write set is then applied – if there are no conflicting locks. At this point, the transaction is considered committed, after which each node continues to apply it to the tablespace.

This approach is also referred to as virtually synchronous replication, since while the writing and committing in tablespace are logically synchronous, they occur independently, and thus asynchronously, on each node.

Benefits of Galera Cluster

Galera Cluster significantly improves High Availability for MySQL and MariaDB. The various ways to achieve High Availability typically include only some of the features available through Galera Cluster, making choosing the Galera Cluster solution with High Availability a serious consideration.

The following features are available through Galera Cluster:

True Multi-Master

You can read and write to any node at any time. Data changes on one node are replicated on all nodes

Synchronous Replication.

There is no slave delay (lag), so no data is lost if a node goes down

Tight coupling

All nodes have the same state. There is no anomalous data between nodes

Multi-Threaded Slave

This provides better performance and larger workloads

No Master-Slave Failover

There is no need for master-slave operations or the use of VIP.

Hot Standby

There is no downtime associated with failures or the intentional removal of a node for maintenance since there is no failover

Automatic node provisioning

There is no need to manually back up the database and copy it to the new node

Supports InnoDB

The InnoDB storage engine provides transaction tables.

Transparent to applications

In general, you do not need to change any application that interfaces with the database as a result of Galera. If you do, the changes will be minimal.

No read and write splitting required

There is no need to split read and write commands

In short, Galera Cluster is a High Availability solution that is both robust in terms of data integrity and high performance with instant failovers

Cloud deployments with Galera Cluster

An additional benefit of Galera Cluster is good cloud support. Automatic node provisioning makes elastic scaling and scaling very easy and smooth. Galera Cluster has proven excellent performance in the cloud, for example when using multiple small node instances, across multiple data centers – AWS zones, for example – or even across Wider Area Networks.

Galera Cluster documentation and downloads

Through this link you can find the different packages of Galera Cluster and supported versions of MySQL. This page also contains all the documentation on how to install it.

MariaDB Galera Cluster can be found through this link.

Galera Manager

The Galera Manager is a graphical user interface (GUI) for creating Galera Clusters on Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). It allows an administrator to easily create and add nodes without having to manually configure each node. Even more inrter interesting, Galera Manager provides graphs for monitoring host and database metrics to ensure the proper and efficient operation of your cluster. There are more than 620 metrics to choose from. Galera Manager is completely Web-based and works in any standard Web browser to manage and monitor your clusters.

Through this link more information on installing and using Galera Manager.