As alway with new technology there is always different approaches regarding the adoption.
You can try to use the bleeding edge features or start with a very standard configuration.
My personal advise to new users is to start with the most basic configuration.
This allow you to get familiar with the fundamentals :
- how to install
- how to operate
- how to monitor
For MariaDB Galera Cluster he most basic configuration is a 3 nodes cluster. You can chose to use it :
as an HA solution
Galera Cluster is currently the easiest way to solve the HA problem.
when you think HA think Galera Cluster it is so much simpler. Failover is totally transparent and you have nothing to do like you would have with standard replication. if you have a lodbalancer in front you just have to push out from the configuration THE FAILED NODE and that is done.
as a scale out solution
A usual MySQL scale out architecture is based on master/slaves architecture. This solution incurs to the application the choice of where to send the read (Master or most up to date slave…). Scale out of read with Galera cluster synchronous replication is much simpler. Nothing need to be done at the application layer.
You have a synchronous data up to data available on all nodes . You do not have the risk to read stale data when the replication lags. Nothing need to be done at the application level like taking care of reading were you write to have correct data.
Contrary to usual HA solutions or compare to MySQL cluster Galera Cluster is very simple to setup and operate.
Getting Started with MariaDB Galera Cluster
Then of course next step is to push Galera usage a little bit further. One main area is of course write scalability.
A few benchmark have been produced but we do not have yet much experience and you have to be more careful. With write/write configurations you have to be careful about hot spots in the database. This can lead to deadlock and the behavior has to be correctly understood.
A good distribution for download to do your testing is : MariaDB Galera Cluster 5.5.29 Stable
Some useful pointers to understand various behaviours of Galera Cluster.
------- upcoming events :
Tomorrow Seppo Jaakola, Codership, will present Galera Cluster for MySQL & MariaDB at the Meetup SkySQL & MariaDB - Paris
Henrik Ingo, Max Mether and Colin Charles will present "MariaDB Galera Cluster Overview" at the free MySQL & Cloud Solutions Day taking place in Santa Clara the 26th of April. You can register for free.