Downtime means disruption and revenue loss. Continuous operation—and the need to avoid unproductive troubleshooting of critical systems—has led to an influx of tools that support high availability.
High availability refers to a collection of technologies designed to eliminate single points of failure that can bring down mission-critical services. In a typical high availability scenario, critical infrastructure is deployed in clusters to maintain redundancy, fault tolerance, and load balancing to share the workload. This strategy ensures that services will continue without interruption if any one component fails.
High availability systems have become the standard for many corporate networks, especially in settings where downtime maps directly to broken operational agreements and revenue loss. High availability is not a single service or application but is more a methodology built into enterprise infrastructure design.
For many organizations, the most valuable asset is the database. Production database systems contain most if not all of a company’s operational data, serving as backends for both internal and external-facing applications.
The importance of data in today’s business environment means that high availability is crucial for the database. It’s like the beating heart of a nervous system; everything stops moving if it goes down. Several high availability database solutions are available today but shop carefully. Many of these systems are proprietary or vendor-specific in ways that could limit flexibility and constrain future growth.
Galera is a high availability database solution for MySQL that is free, open source, and easy to deploy. Because Galera is open source and independent of any cloud vendor, it is an excellent choice for organizations that want to avoid platform lock-in and maintain portability as they grow.
A Galera cluster is a true multi-master system that provides performant synchronous replication, which avoids the shortcomings of the common primary/secondary model. It is often our go-to recommendation for new or existing customers looking to host or scale websites with high availability and those looking to migrate a managed database from another provider.
It also doesn’t require hours of manual labor to set up, especially when using IaC tools such as Ansible. Our custom Ansible playbook can stand up your new high availability Galera cluster in minutes.
Migrating workloads to another cloud provider doesn’t have to be a headache. Fast and easy deployment of Galera with Ansible is an example of how open source software works together on Linode, providing powerful, versatile, and portable solutions that save money and keep your systems in continuous operation. Whether you are building new cloud infrastructure, migrating from another platform, or adding Linode to existing infrastructure, our Professional Services team can assist you with designing and building your high availability systems.
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