Follower Clusters – 3 Major Use Cases for Syncing SQL & NoSQL Deployments

Follower clusters are a ScaleGrid feature that allows you to keep two independent database systems (of the same type) in sync. Unlike cloning or replication, this allows you to maintain an active, point-in-time copy of your production data. This extra cluster, known as a follower cluster, can be leveraged for multiple use cases, including for analyzing, optimizing and testing your application performance for MongoDB, MySQL and PostgreSQL. In this blog post, we will cover the top three scenarios to leverage follower clusters for your application.

How Do Follower Clusters Differ From Replication?

Unlike a static clone, this data imports on a set schedule so your follower cluster is always in sync with your production cluster. Here are a few critical ways in which it differs from replication:

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MySQL High Availability Framework Explained – Part III: Failover Scenarios

In this three-part blog series, we introduced a High Availability (HA) Framework for MySQL hosting in Part I, and discussed the details of MySQL semisynchronous replication in Part II. Now in Part III, we review how the framework handles some of the important MySQL failure scenarios and recovers to ensure high availability.

MySQL Failover Scenarios

Scenario 1 – Master MySQL Goes Down

• The Corosync and Pacemaker framework detects that the master MySQL is no longer available. Pacemaker demotes the master resource and tries to recover with a restart of the MySQL service, if possible.
• At this point, due to the semisynchronous nature of the replication, all transactions committed on the master have been received by at least one of the slaves.
• Pacemaker waits until all the received transactions are applied on the slaves and lets the slaves report their promotion scores. The score calculation is done in such a way that the score is ‘0’ if a slave is completely in sync with the master, and is a negative number otherwise.
• Pacemaker picks the slave that has reported the 0 score and promotes that slave which now assumes the role of master MySQL on which writes are allowed.
• After slave promotion, the Resource Agent triggers a DNS rerouting module. The module updates the proxy DNS entry with the IP address of the new master, thus, facilitating all application writes to be redirected to the new master.
• Pacemaker also sets up the available slaves to start replicating from this new master.

Thus, whenever a master MySQL goes down (whether due to a MySQL crash, OS crash, system reboot, etc.), our HA framework detects it and promotes a suitable slave to take over the role of the master. This ensures that the system continues to be available to the applications.

Scenario 2 – Slave MySQL Goes Down

• The Corosync and Pacemaker framework detects that the slave MySQL is no longer available.
• Pacemaker tries to recover the resource by trying to restart MySQL on the node. If it comes up, it is added back to the current master as a slave and replication continues.
• If recovery fails, Pacemaker reports that resource as down – based on which alerts or notifications can be generated. If necessary, the ScaleGrid support team will handle the recovery of this node.
• In this case, there is no impact on the availability of MySQL services.

Scenario 3 – Network Partition – Network Connectivity Breaks Down Between Master and Slave Nodes

This is a classical problem in any distributed system where each node thinks the other nodes are down, while in reality, only the network communication between the nodes is broken. This scenario is more commonly known as split-brain scenario, and if not handled properly, can lead to more than one node claiming to be a master MySQL which in turn leads to data inconsistencies and corruption.

Let’s use an example to review how our framework deals with split-brain scenarios in the cluster. We assume that due to network issues, the cluster has partitioned into two groups – master in one group and 2 slaves in the other group, and we will denote this as [(M), (S1,S2)].

• Corosync detects that the master node is not able to communicate with the slave nodes, and the slave nodes can communicate with each other, but not with the master.
• The master node will not be able to commit any transactions as the semisynchronous replication expects acknowledgement from at least one of the slaves before the master can commit. At the same time, Pacemaker shuts down MySQL on the master node due to lack of quorum based on the Pacemaker setting ‘no-quorum-policy = stop’. Quorum here means a majority of the nodes, or two out of three in a 3-node cluster setup. Since there is only one master node running in this partition of the cluster, the no-quorum-policy setting is triggered leading to the shutdown of the MySQL master.
• Now, Pacemaker on the partition [(S1), (S2)] detects that there is no master available in the cluster and initiates a promotion process. Assuming that S1 is up to date with the master (as guaranteed by semisynchronous replication), it is then promoted as the new master.
• Application traffic will be redirected to this new master MySQL node and the slave S2 will start replicating from the new master.

Thus, we see that the MySQL HA framework handles split-brain scenarios effectively, ensuring both data consistency and availability in the event the network connectivity breaks between master and slave nodes.

This concludes our 3-part blog series on the MySQL High Availability (HA) framework using semisynchronous replication and the Corosync plus Pacemaker stack. At ScaleGrid, we offer highly available hosting for MySQL on AWS and MySQL on Azure that is implemented based on the concepts explained in this blog series. Please visit the ScaleGrid Console for a free trial of our solutions.

Intro to Redis Cluster Sharding – Advantages, Limitations, Deploying & Client Connections

Redis Cluster is the native sharding implementation available within Redis that allows you to automatically distribute your data across multiple nodes without having to rely on external tools and utilities. At ScaleGrid, we recently added support for Redis Clusters on our platform through our fully managed Redis hosting plans. In this post, we’re going to introduce you to the advanced Redis Cluster sharding opportunities, discuss its advantages and limitations, when you should deploy, and how to connect to your Redis Cluster.

Sharding with Redis Cluster

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Slow MySQL Start Time in GTID mode? Binary Log File Size May Be The Issue

Have you been experiencing slow MySQL startup times in GTID mode? We recently ran into this issue on one of our MySQL hosting deployments and set out to solve the problem. In this blog, we break down the issue that could be slowing down your MySQL restart times, how to debug for your deployment, and what you can do to decrease your start time and improve your understanding of GTID-based replication.

How We Found The Problem

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non-sequential, unique identifier, strategy question

(Please bare with me, I'm a new, passionate, confident and terrified programmer :D ) Background: I'm pre-launch and 1 year into the development of my application. My target is to be able to eventually handle millions of registered users with 5-10% of them concurrent. Up to this point I've used auto-increment to assign unique identifiers to rows. I am now considering switching to a non-sequential strategy. Oh, I'm using the LAMP configuration. My reasons for avoiding auto-increment: 1. Complicates replication when scaling horizontally. Risk of collision is significant (when running multiple masters). Note: I've read the other entries in this forum that relate to ID generation and there have been some great suggestions -- including a strategy that uses auto-increment in a way that avoids this pitfall... That said, I'm still nervous about it. 2. Potential bottleneck when retrieving/assigning IDs -- IDs assigned at the database. My reasons for being nervous about non-sequential IDs: 1. To guarantee uniqueness, the IDs are going to be much larger -- potentially affecting performance significantly My New Strategy: (I haven't started to implement this... I'm waiting for someone smarter than me to steer me in the right direction) 1. Generate a guaranteed-unique ID by concatenating the user id (1-9 digits) and the UNIX timestamp(10 digits). 2. Convert the resulting 11-19 digit number to base_36. The resulting string will be alphanumeric and 6-10 characters long. This is, of course, much shorter (at least with regard to characters) then the standard GUID hash. 3. Pass the new identifier to a column in the database that is type CHAR() set to binary. My Questions: 1. Is this a valid strategy? Is my logic sound or flawed? Should I go back to being a graphic designer? 2. What is the potential hit to performance? 3. Is a 11-19 digit number (base 10) actually any larger (in terms of bytes) than its base-36 equivalent? I appreciate your insights... and High Scalability for supplying this resource!

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Beta testers wanted for ultra high-scalability/performance clustered object storage system designed for web content delivery

DataDirect Networks (www.ddn.com) is searching for beta testers for our exciting new object-based clustered storage system. Does this sound like you? * Need to store millions to hundreds of billions of files * Want to use one big file system but can't because no single file system scales big enough * Running out of inodes * Have to constantly tweak file systems to perform better * Need to replicate content to more than one data center across geographies * Have thumbnail images or other small files that wreak havoc on your file and storage systems * Constantly tweaking and engineering around performance and scalability limits * No storage system delivers enough IOPS to serve your content * Spend time load balancing the storage environment * Want a single, simple way to manage all this data If this sounds like you, please contact me at jgoldstein@ddn.com. DataDirect Networks is a 10-year old, well-established storage systems company specializing in Extreme Storage environments. We've deployed both the largest and the fastest storage/file systems on the planet - currently running at over 250GB/s. Our upcoming product is going to change the way storage is deployed for scalable web content and we're seeking testers who can throw their most challenging problems at our new system. It's time for something better and we're going to deliver it.

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MySQL Database Scale-out and Replication for High Growth Businesses

It is widely recognized that MySQL is the most popular database software in the world. Since its inception in 1995, there have been 11 million product installations around the world in a wide variety of markets. There are more installations of MySQL in use today than any other database architecture. From startup companies hoping to be the next Web2.0 poster child to large global enterprises, the MySQL database architecture has proven to be flexible, extendable, scalable, and more than capable of filling high-capacity database roles in very different venues.

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Product: Tungsten Replicator

With Tungsten Replicator Continuent is trying to deliver a better master/slave replication system. Their goal: scalability, reliability with seamless failover, no performance loss. From their website: The Tungsten Replicator implements open source database-neutral master/slave replication. Master/slave replication is a highly flexible technology that can solve a wide variety of problems including the following: * Availability - Failing over to a slave database if your master database dies * Performance Scaling - Spreading reads across many copies of data * Cross-Site Clustering - Maintaining active database replicas across WANs * Change Data Capture - Extracting changes to load data warehouses or update other systems * Zero Downtime Upgrade - Performing upgrades on a slave server which then becomes the master The Tungsten Replicator architecture is flexible and designed to support addition of new databases easily. It includes pluggable extractor and applier modules to help transfer data from master to slave. The Replicator is designed to include a number of specialized features designed to improve its usefulness for particular problems like availability. * Replicated changes have transaction IDs and are stored in a transaction history log that is identical for each server. This feature allows masters and slaves to exchange roles easily. * Smooth procedures for planned and unplanned failover. * Built-in consistency check tables and events allow users to check consistency between tables without stopping replication or applications. * Support for statement as well as row replication. * Hooks to allow data transformations when replicating between different database types. Tungsten Replicator is not a toy. It is designed to allow commercial construction of robust database cluster

Related Articles

Tungsten ScaleOut Stack - an open source collection of integrated projects for database scale-out making use of commodity hardware.

Continuent Intros Tungsten Replicator by Shamila Janakiraman.

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Product: ChironFS

If you are trying to create highly available file systems, especially across data centers, then ChironFS is one potential solution. It's relatively new, so there aren't lots of experience reports, but it looks worth considering. What is ChironFS and how does it work? Adapted from the ChironFS website: The Chiron Filesystem is a Fuse based filesystem that frees you from single points of failure. It's main purpose is to guarantee filesystem availability using replication. But it isn't a RAID implementation. RAID replicates DEVICES not FILESYSTEMS. Why not just use RAID over some network block device? Because it is a block device and if one server mounts that device in RW mode, no other server will be able to mount it in RW mode. Any real network may have many servers and offer a variety of services. Keeping everything running can become a real nightmare!

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another approach to replication

File replication based on erasure codes can reduce total replicas size 2 times and more.

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