Lightning Talks

The role of the DBA is evolving, as more companies and products move to a hybrid model where, along with their traditional work, DBAs are expected to code. We've scaled our Data Stores team to bring in pure developers, pure DBAs, and a mix of both. We were able to find creative ways to help support our DBAs to better adapt to the changes in the industry. We're discovering how increasingly complex it is to find candidates with this mix of experience, and through learning from our struggles we have learned the best methods to find DBAs and to help them evolve. We want DBAs to be prepared for this new world and would love to share our industry findings with this community.

Scaling MySQL infrastructure is challenging, traditional setup don't scale horizontally and require manual configuration management.

This talk is about how we scaled MySQL infrastructure at Indeed. Using HaProxy, we dynamically take backends in/out of rotation based on replication lag. Through this proxy, we load-balance reads across a pool of replicas, ensure replication lag is below a threshold, and easily take replicas out of rotation for maintenance, removing the work of manually updating application's configuration.

You will also learn about different routing strategy we use, such as fail-to-primary vs fail-open, and about surprising application connection pool's behaviors we learned along the way.