MariaDB Galera Cluster 5.5.29 stable (GA) has been released by the MariaDB team today. This is good news to all those MariaDB users that have been waiting to get Galera synchronous multi-master replication to their favorite MySQL flavor. MariaDB Galera Cluster is available from the MariaDB.org download area.

If you are new to Galera clustering, you should read Monty's blog post from today that gives some of the highlights of why this is an important improvement for MariaDB users that need High Availability, scale out and elasticity. To learn more, I invite you to read our online Galera documentation.

I also want to take this opportunity to thank Monty and the MariaDB team for the fruitful co-operation leading up to this release. Our model in developing Galera has always been based on partnerships like this one, and I want to give recognition of the importance of QA and other feedback we get from working together with the MariaDB team, and ultimately with the MariaDB user community.

Finally, this release is also significant for Galera because with this release we have achieved our ambition to provide state of the art synchronous replication for all three of the major MySQL variants (forks). We started developing Galera in 2007, before any of the forks even existed, and launched version 1.0 in 2011. Now in 2013 Galera is available and becoming a mainstream option for high-availability across the MySQL ecosystem.

To implement synchronous replication, and also to provide a seamless, integrated experience, Galera replication is integrated into the MySQL C++ code base through the wsrep api. However, it was never our intention to become our own MySQL fork, rather we just want to focus on building state of the art replication technology, and make it available for whichever MySQL flavor you prefer to use. The way the MariaDB project is setup as an inclusive and open project fits our way of working very well. It has been easy for us to work directly with the MariaDB code base and the other MariaDB developers, and we are proud to together release to you today the first GA release of MariaDB Galera Cluster.

To get started with MariaDB Galera Cluster, you might want to take a look at Codership support and consulting services. As a special offer we are currently giving out free 1 hour consulting conference calls to help you get started with Galera.