1.1. Galera Cluster Benefits

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:

  • True multi-master—Read and write to any node at any time.
  • Synchronous replication—No slave lag, no data is lost at node crash.
  • Tightly coupled—All nodes hold the same state. No diverged data between nodes allowed.
  • Multi-threaded slave—For better performance. For any workload.
  • No master-slave failover operations or use of VIP.
  • Hot standby—No downtime during failover (since there is no failover).
  • Automatic node provisioning—No need to manually back up the database and copy it to the new node.
  • Supports InnoDB storage engine.
  • Tranparent to applications—Required no (or minimal) changes) to the application.
  • No read and write splitting needed.

The result is a high availability solution that is both robust in terms of data integrity and high performance with instant failovers.

1.1.1. Galera Cluster Cloud Implementations

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.

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