The Pivotal Cloud Foundry team is excited to announce that the Pivotal Services catalog now includes a highly available MySQL database. Applications running on Pivotal Cloud Foundry can now be backed by a resilient relational database. This integrated Database as a Service (DBaaS) ensures continuous availability of critical applications, without requiring the operational overhead of creating and managing a MySQL cluster.
Pivotal Cloud Foundry is driven by the ideal that a cloud platform should enable a rapid speed to market for applications, while offering continuous availability of the applications on that platform. MySQL, an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS), is a popular choice of database among many of our customers. While we have provided MySQL as a service for some time, we felt that it needed to be expanded in order to to be highly available for users. The result is a fully managed database service (DBaaS) that can be deployed with a multi-node cluster.
Simplifying MySQL Database Complexity
At Pivotal we realize how complex it is for administrators to configure a MySQL cluster that provides continuous availability. While bringing this service to Cloud Foundry, we worked hard to minimize the effort required from administrators to create, configure, and manage a MySQL cluster. The platform now allows developers to self-provision databases on a cluster of highly available services. These databases are bound to the identified applications, all through an easy-to-use interface.
The new, highly-available MySQL service can be downloaded from Pivotal Network. Once added to the Services Marketplace, it will stand as a fully-integrated and managed service. The available cluster is fully configured and integrated into the Pivotal Cloud Foundry platform, automatically. MySQL is operated ‘as a Service’ within Cloud Foundry, meaning that it is automatically configured via a simple interface, which incorporates full lifecycle management support such as software updates and patching.
How Pivotal Provides High Availability for MySQL
Pivotal currently uses MariaDB, an enhanced drop-in replacement for MySQL, in Pivotal Cloud Foundry, and takes advantage of the Galera plug-in for clustering. The Galera Cluster plug-in provides a synchronous multi-master cluster for MariaDB, that quickly replicates your data to all cluster nodes, without losing transactions. It provides a scalable way to replicate your data, ensuring that applications can read/write to databases even in the case of a failure.
The MySQL service is deployed with a cluster of three nodes. If your environment has multiple Availability Zones, the provisioned cluster nodes will be balanced across all of them. All of the data in each node is replicated to all other nodes. In the event of a network partition, the Galera plug-in prevents cluster nodes in the minority side of the partition from accepting writes, thus preventing a split brain scenario.
Should one of the nodes in the cluster fail, the application connections will be severed. Once the application connection is reconnected, it will be immediately routed to a healthy node. This failover functionality is managed by a proxy tier that sits between the application and the database. The responsibility of this proxy tier is to monitor the health of the MySQL cluster nodes, and ensure that traffic is routed to the available nodes.
Self-Provisioning, Highly-Available MySQL
Pivotal Cloud Foundry offers the new MySQL service via download from Pivotal Network. Simply deploy the service with Pivotal Operations Manager, and developers will then find the service in the Services Marketplace in Pivotal Cloud Foundry. You can read more about the latest MySQL for Pivotal Cloud Foundry service release and download the service at Pivotal Network, and watch our video to see the MySQL service in action.
RESOURCES:
- Download the MySQL service from Pivotal Network
- Read more about Pivotal Cloud Foundry
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