Managing your Databases

Posted: Fri, 22 March 2013 | permalink | No comments

The Standalone Sysadmin asks, “How do you manage database server instances?”:

Do you have one (or a few) centralized database servers, either standalone or clustered, or do you spread the load like we are currently?

His argument for centralisation is one of easing the management burden of configuration and backups, whereas the distributed approach eliminates a central point of failure and performance degradation.

I go for distributed, all the way. For a start, we run so many databases for so many customers that there’s no way on earth we could stand up a small number of database servers and handle all the load (hell, we’ve got single customers who consume a cluster of machines with 384GB of RAM and all the SSDs you can eat). Security and permissions is a whole other kettle of fish; the contortions we’d have to do to allow customers the level of management they need with a centralised database system would be immense. Then there’s the need of some customers for MySQL, some for PgSQL, different performance tuning for different workloads… nope, centralised DBs don’t work for us.

Given this, we’ve bitten the bullet and solved pretty much all of the management problems. Installation and configuration is all handled via Puppet, and backups are trivial – the same system that installs the DB server itself also drops a hook script that the backup agent uses to know that it has to dump a database server. Monitoring that this backup is taking place successfully is also automatically provisioned, so we know that we’re not missing anything.

Ultimately, this same approach applies to practically anything that you’re tossing up between centralised and distributed. At scale, you can never rely on centralisation, so you may as well bite the bullet and learn how to do it distributed pretty much from the start. That saves some serious system shock when you discover what your hardware vendor wants for the next step up in big iron hardware…


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