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OptimaData is a consulting, support and reseller partner of Codership, the builder and developer of Galera Cluster.
OptimaData is a consulting, support and reseller partner of Codership, the builder and developer of Galera Cluster and Galera Manager. Codership uses different Galera distributions for clustering MySQL, MariaDB but also Percona XtraDB. Of course in the different versions of MySQL and MariaDB.
Recently in 2022, Codership released Galera Manager so that anyone can easily deploy their Galera clusters within an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) environment or just on-premises. Even monitoring an existing cluster is possible.
Take a look at our Galera newspage for the latest 2025 news and resources about Galera Cluster and Manager.
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.
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:
You can read and write to any node at any time. Data changes on one node are replicated on all nodes
There is no slave delay (lag), so no data is lost if a node goes down
All nodes have the same state. There is no anomalous data between nodes
This provides better performance and larger workloads
There is no need for master-slave operations or the use of VIP.
There is no downtime associated with failures or the intentional removal of a node for maintenance since there is no failover
There is no need to manually back up the database and copy it to the new node
The InnoDB storage engine provides transaction tables.
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.
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
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.
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.
The Galera Manager is a graphical user interface (GUI) for creating Galera Clusters on Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) or just on-premises. 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.
Galera Manager supports the following database engines: MariaDB 10.3, 10.4, 10.5, 10.6 LTS, 10.7, 10.9, 10.10, 10.11 LTS, MySQL 5.7, MySQL 8.0, Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) 8.0.
Galera Manager supports the following operating systems: Debian 11 & 12, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, Ubuntu 20.04 & 22.04, CentOS 7, Debian 10, and Ubuntu 18.04.
Through this link more information on installing and using Galera Manager.
Only Certified Support Partners may provide level 3 and 24/7 support on Galera Cluster environments at customer and end-user sites. These partners have direct contact with the Codership developers. For the Benelux, OptimaData is the Codership Certified Support Partner.
OptimaData’s experts know better than anyone else how best to implement and optimize Galera Cluster in combination with MySQL and/or MariaDB. We provide appropriate advice on configurations and structure. We can design, build, optimize and monitor. Interested or in need of help, consultant, advice or support? Feel free to call us or contact us!