High Availability for MySQL: Considering the Options

"There are many layers to consider when it comes to databases, and the variety of solutions is difficult to choose from. Depending on your availability goals, the storage system back-ends you wish to use, and the type of MySQL tables used, the answer will vary. Let's try to untangle this mess.

"To make matters even worse, people often combine multiple solutions to deal with the two types of scale at once: both vertical and horizontal. We covered the different types of scaling in a recent article about VM Scaling, but briefly: up (vertical) means more compute power, out (horizontal) means to spread the load across multiple servers.

"More often, however, database administrators have more than enough power in a single server to cope with the load. The primary need in that situation is to provide a mechanism for high availability, so a failed server won't stop MySQL from functioning. Here are the most popular solutions to deal with both types of situations, in multiple ways."

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