Galera Cluster is a significant step in terms of improving MySQL high availability. The MySQL ecosystem has offered users various ways to achieve high availability, but typically all alternatives have provided only some of the following features, but not all, thus making the choice of a high availability solution an exercise in tradeoffs.
Galera Cluster provides all of the following features:
The result is a high availability solution that is both robust in terms of data integrity and high performance with instant failovers.
Another main benefit of Galera Cluster is good cloud support. Automatic node provisioning makes elastic scale-out and scale-in operations painless. Galera Cluster has proven to perform extremely well in the cloud, such as when using multiple small node instances, across multiple data centers (for example, AWS zones) or even over Wider Area Networks.