Percona Live 2017: Lessons Learned While Automating MySQL Deployments in the AWS Cloud

The last day of Percona Live 2017 is still going strong, with talks all the way until 4:00 pm (and closing remarks and a prize giveaway on the main stage then). I’m going to a few more sessions today, including one from Stephane Combaudon from Slice Technologies: Lessons learned while automating MySQL deployments in the AWS Cloud.

In this talk, Stephane discussed how automating deployments is a key success factor in the cloud. It is actually a great way to leverage the flexibility of the cloud. But often while automation is not too difficult for application code, it is much harder for databases. When Slice started automating their MySQL servers at Slice, they chose simple and production-proven components: Chef to deploy files, MHA for high availability and Percona XtraBackup for backups. But they faced several problems very quickly:

• How do you maintain an updated list of MySQL servers in the MHA configuration when servers can be automatically stopped or started?
• How can you coordinate your servers for them to know that they need to be configured as a master or as a replica?
• How do you write complex logic with Chef without being trapped with Chef’s two pass model?
• How can you handle clusters with different MySQL versions, or a single cluster where all members do not use the same MySQL version?
• How can you get reasonable backup and restore time when the dataset is over 1TB and the backups are stored on S3?

This session discussed the errors Slice made, and the solutions they found while tackling MySQL automation.

Stephane was kind enough to let me speak with him after the talk: check it out below:

There are more talks today. Check out Thursday’s schedule here. Don’t forget to attend the Closing Remarks and prize give away at 4:00 pm.