VMware Tanzu continues to iterate and improve on our Data Service solutions for customers coming off the latest announcement of VMware Tanzu Platform, a consolidated offering for our modern application platform. Tanzu Platform offers customers a rich set of data service offerings as part of the platform. Core data services included in the Tanzu Platform SKU, such as MySQL, Postgres, RabbitMQ and ValKey (Open Source Fork of Redis) offer enterprise-grade fleet management, security, and disaster recovery capabilities.
Customer can expect the same services, features, and benefits in VMware Tanzu Platform for Cloud Foundry, formerly known as Tanzu Application Service. Tanzu Platform for Cloud Foundry continues to be a secure runtime environment with reduced risk and little to no platform downtime. Platform engineering and development teams can continue to boost their efficiencies while not having to spend time troubleshooting in the platform while continuing to focus on writing quality code.
In this blog, we focus on the latest enhancements to Tanzu for MySQL for Tanzu Platform for Cloud Foundry and what benefits customers can expect when leveraging through their environment(s).
What's New?
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- Faster backups with smaller backup artifacts that are streamed directly to the blobstore for improved recovery point objective (RPO) and lower disk usage
- Cross topology restore for faster recovery time objective (RTO)
- Upgrade seamlessly with no downtime using HA Multi-site enables and cross-cloud disaster recovery capabilities
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Let’s get into the details of each of these new features.
High-speed backup streams
With our latest release, you can rest easy knowing your backups and restores will use less persistent disk space by leveraging a new streaming format and more efficient compression. Our backup performance has substantially improved and our benchmark tests performed using a publicly available dataset sample of around 150GiB using a range of compute configurations (2 core / 2GB, 4 core / 16 GB, 8 core / 64 GB) revealed 8x improvements in backup speed and produced 13% smaller backup artifacts. Backups and restore processes do not consume additional persistent disk space due to the newly introduced streaming capabilities.
Restore backups to any plan type
We are enabling application developers to restore a backup to any plan-type of their choice and consequently improve the RTO goals for their application workloads. Application developers can also restore into a non-empty database.
Use HA and Multi-site together
We have further enhanced MySQL disaster recovery by adding the capability to set up High Availability leaders in multi-site setups. This is important for customers that operate multiple foundations because:
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- Application developers save time by not having to switch over to the secondary instance (running on a different foundation) while attempting to upgrade the primary instance of the multi-site setup. This is because a Highly Available Tanzu with MySQL instance comes with rolling upgrade/update capabilities. The implication is that, a Multi-site HA leader supporting a critical application is able to be upgraded without any downtime.
- Critical applications have less chance of failing with the help of HA support for multi-site, minimizing risks associated with a single node MySQL instance
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The process of setting up a highly available leader node for a multi-site plan is the same as setting up a multi-site plan with a single node leader. On the primary foundation, customers will set up a designated primary instance with HA Cluster plan type and on the secondary foundation, customers will setup a designated secondary instance with the Multi-site Replication plan type. Customers will then set up the primary (a HA cluster in this case) to replicate to the secondary instance. This configuration completes the multi-site setup which offers high availability and disaster recovery capabilities to support critical customer workloads.
Tanzu Platform for Cloud Foundry can be deployed on any supported cloud infrastructure (vSphere, AWS, Azure, GCP, and Openstack) making these multi-site topologies very powerful and unlocks multiple use-cases. Some of the possibilities into failover or switchover from a Tanzu Platform foundation, either on-prem or on GCP, to AWS, Azure or vSphere.
Making Multi-site MySQL deployments a breeze for Application Developer-facing plugins
We are also making the setup of a multi-site instances simple and easy for customers by extending the existing MySQLTools plugin. A single mysql-tools command will allow application developers to configure multi-site MySQL instances across two foundations. App developers can also seamlessly switch over an existing multi-site instance (HA and non-HA) during routine maintenance with a single command. In case of a multi-site instance with a HA leader, the switchover process will also automatically upgrade the newly designated primary instance on the secondary foundation to a HA Cluster plan type.
These new features will be a great addition to the existing set of robust capabilities that Tanzu customers can expect from MySQL for Tanzu Platform.
For more information about this data service offering, visit us to learn more here. Visit our website for more information about Tanzu's other data services and how Tanzu Platform for Cloud Foundry and Data Services is the best place to run your modern applications.
