AWS CloudFormation allows you to make and manage AWS resources. You could also deploy and update these resources in a way that is both predictable and orderly. You can create your own templates to help you run your applications easily, taking away the guess work when it comes to the order in which these requirements are run and how to make them work.
After deploying a CloudFormation template, you can change it so that everything works the way you want it. This gives you a way to apply version control to your templates, in a manner that is very similar to versioning your software. Everything — from your templates to the stack — is deployed using AWS Management Console, application programming interfaces or the AWS Command Line. CloudFormation is available to AWS customers with no additional fees except for the charges you incur from using the AWS resources that you use for your applications.
But did you know that you could use AWS CloudFormation to create a MySQL Fabric server farm easily and quickly? On top of being able to synchronize your development, quality assurance and production environments and giving you a way to implement a fast disaster recovery solution, CloudFormation is also perfect for MySQL Fabric.
Why is CloudFormation also perfect for MySQL Fabric?
Because CloudFormation can help you do away with the bootstrap steps that you need to go through when creating a distributed system.
Using CloudFormation, you will only be dealing with three questions when you are installing MySQL Fabric: the Access Key, the Key Pair Name and the Secret Key. A sample script is found here.
This template might just be a proof of concept and it may need a lot of work to ensure that the installations go error free, it does make it apparent that you can easily install MySQL Fabric farms without going through a lot of steps. Looking at it another way, it means that you can easily take advantage of the many benefits and features of MySQL Fabric, such as:
- High availability, which is built of mature MySQL Replication technology that is used by the world’s biggest Web sites. It also allows for server monitoring, automated failover, transparent failover, semi-synchronous replication and geographic redundancy.
- Sharding, which enables you to scale reads and writes easily and automatically. You also get to use user defined shard keys – that your data is even distributed between the different shards. MySQL Fabric also maps the shard key to the shard that contains the appropriate data.
- MySQL Fabric aware connectors, which allows MySQL Fabric to route queries and transactions based on the knowledge it already has about the server farm and the state of the servers. It also allows you to automatically route transactions and queries to the correct shard. Moreover, the writes are sent to the master site rather than to the back up.
With MySQL Fabric, you also have system wide coordination from managing all the MySQL Servers running on the instance. You have centralized schema that you could maintain or update across all shards as well. It also needs no agents and no proxies, which simplifies its architecture.
Imagine getting all these with a few simple steps? Call Four Cornerstone today if you want this functionality. Our team of MySQL and Oracle experts can help you get your mind wrapped around MySQL Fabric and AWS CloudFormation.
