Take Control of Your Mission-Critical MySQL / MariaDB Data

I recently heard about a company that left the public cloud; by their calculations, this company would save about $7 million dollars in server expenses over 5 years without changing the size of their ops team. The CTO wrote:

“Bandwidth, power, and boxes on an amortization schedule of five years… And we’ll have much faster hardware, many more cores, incredibly cheaper NVMe storage, and room to expand at a very low cost (as long as we can still fit in four racks per DC).

It may seem arduous, but there are ways to build a customized database stack for mission-critical data where you have full control. For mission-critical applications that must perform continuously 24/7/365, it might make a lot of sense to consider, as there are many benefits to taking control of your mission-critical data and operations. Below are a couple important points to consider when doing an analysis of what’s best for your application and end users.

You don’t have to exit the public cloud to take control of your data. You can leverage public cloud servers such as EC2 and install an open source database like MySQL or MariaDB on them. It doesn’t really matter where your database is hosted, as long as it’s the optimal configuration for your application and user base. Setting up a hybrid cloud configuration, with some servers on-prem replicating to and from database servers in the cloud, might make the most sense; taking control of your data does not always mean buying your own servers, although that is an option. The point is that we should not assume that the public cloud is the cheapest and best way, especially for mission-critical applications that must be always-on.

You don’t have to re-engineer your application to take control of your data. When you use a database proxy, such as Tungsten Connector, connections between your application and your database layer are handled gracefully and optimally. All database cluster operations are masked, so the application continues to run when there are changes or issues at the database level. In fact, this means you can even set up and deploy a database layer under your full control with minimal, if any, application downtime. So while it may seem overwhelming to manage your own database layer, having the right tools for the job makes it easy.

The company that inspired this blog post suggests that not researching the rental bill associated with reliance on cloud is financial malpractice at this point.

“Get some real world numbers. Make up your own mind.”

Running an open source database such as MySQL, MariaDB, or Percona Server for MySQL anywhere you like, deployed in clusters for availability, as well as disaster recovery, performance and other benefits, might be all you need to take control of your data. You’re not paying for bells and whistles or brand names that don’t bring any value to your end-users. It might take a little work up front to research, but infrastructure-level and database-level changes for mission-critical applications are well worth the effort.

If you’re interested in a database clustering solution that enables freedom, flexibility and ownership, please feel free to reach out. Tungsten Clustering includes 24/7/365 support from highly experienced experts who respond within an average of 3 minutes when you need them.