We recently (December 8 2022) did a webinar for how Galera Manager can manage Galera Clusters for you. Most of it was a live demo, so attendees got to see:
- a 3-node Galera Cluster created automatically in Amazon Web Services (AWS) EC2 from scratch, with just an API key (in our example we used CentOS 7 with MySQL 8)
- the installation of 3-blank nodes, which Galera Manager provisioned (in our example we used Ubuntu 20.04 LTS with MySQL 8)
- connect to several nodes in an existing Galera Cluster, to manage and monitor them
We’ll make some shorter videos of all of these, with lengthier explanations going forward, because it is clear some people are more visual than others. One thing that we’d like to draw your attention to: Galera Manager is free to download and use, and on comparable instances, you might find that the solution is not only cheaper than cloud offerings, while also giving you the benefit of virtually synchronous replication.
In quick tests on small instances, we found that you could run a 3-node Galera Cluster with one Galera Manager instance (so a total of 4 instances) much cheaper:
- DigitalOcean had a base cost of $90, but you could get setup with the above for between $42-48
- On AWS, you were looking at about $21.48 versus $50.17 for RDS MySQL and $53.86 for RDS MySQL Aurora
So consider giving Galera Manager a try. You may be pleasantly surprised that it does what it says it will do, and you may end up saving money, too.
Before signing off, it is also interesting to note that about 88% of our webinar participants preferred to run on their existing hardware, i.e. they’d like to have it deployed in the data centre. This was surprising! The rest picked AWS. Do we go for Google Cloud Platform or Microsoft Azure next, for a deployment option?