High availability and disaster recovery are critical for cloud databases, but not all HA architectures deliver the same level of resilience when failures occur.
DBTA recently held a webinar, Beyond Hyperscaler HA: Building Resilient Cloud Databases, with MariaDB experts who looked at the limitations of traditional hyperscaler DBaaS HA approaches and explained how modern database architectures can minimize disruption and maintain application availability.
According to Jags Ramnarayan, CTO cloud at MariaDB and Fermi Fang, senior product marketing manager at MariaDB, high availability is, “The ability of an IT system, service, or component to remain operational and accessible for a very high percentage of time.”
Best practices to achieve high availability include the following:
- Network Load Balancing
- Failover Replicas
- Clustering
- Geographic Redundancy
However, there are several limitations to these recommendations. Network Load Balancing can offer a complex proxy; no transparent HA risks transaction and session loss. Failover Replicas can go into passive standby, and DNSbased failover causes 1–2 min crash recovery delays. Clustering offers a single writer and async replication that can risk data loss and replica lag. And Geographic Redundancy DR limited to single cloud provider; caps availability at 99.95% SLA.
Ramnarayan and Fang presented a case study where a global SaaS in the Hospitality business used MariaDB Cloud to power their mission critical SaaS platform that serves 5500 properties across more than 100 countries.
The challenge:
- Limited failover capabilities caused frequent service interruptions to their mission critical SaaS platform which was sensitive to connection level failures.
- Scaling their database required complex workarounds, no out-of-the-box clustering
MariaDB Cloud Solution:
- Automated failover without requiring idle standby instances, ensuring uninterrupted operations, and reducing downtime risks
- Scale efficiently, supporting larger instance sizes, 5k-plus concurrent sessions delivering very low latency.
MariaDB Cloud provides always active replicas, instant failover no crash recovery, they explained. It offers built-in transparent proxy with TXN/session replay. It can fully sync replication, with zero data loss across clusters and provides cross-cloud DR, resilience across different providers, with up to 99.995% SLA.
For the full webinar, featuring a more in-depth discussion, Q&A, and more, you can view an archived version of the webinar here.