New: Dedicated MySQL services 27 Aug 10

One of the many benefits of the Brightbox service is access to our shared MySQL clusters. The shared MySQL service enables a low barrier-to-entry and is perfect for many customers, but there are situations where something a little beefier is needed or something with more control. We’ve been running dedicated MySQL clusters for a long time now, but they’ve been something we usually only did for larger customers, alongside full gold support.

That has now changed! Today, we’re really pleased to announce two new dedicated MySQL options: a single dedicated MySQL server and a dedicated HA (High Availability) cluster.

Both services provide you with the benefits of increased performance and predictability with guaranteed CPU and RAM resources, and also include 24/7 monitoring and managed backups!

Pricing starts at just £85/month for a single dedicated MySQL instance and £169/month for the HA cluster – a bargain for what are essentially fully-managed MySQL solutions. They’re available to all customers to purchase from the control panel right now.

For more information, check out the dedicated MySQL services page on our main site.

Shared MySQL improvements 23 Dec 09

Over the last few weeks we’ve been working on scaling our shared MySQL facilities. Until recently, we’ve been able to run a single (albeit hefty) shared MySQL cluster but due to growing demand we’ve needed to scale this up considerably. The main cluster has had some performance problems recently and, while some tuning and vertical scaling bought us some time (we more than doubled the resources of the main cluster), the real focus has been on horizontal scaling.

We’ve built a bunch of new master-master replicated pairs and our backend systems now distribute customers between them on sign-up. We’ve also been contacting some customers and moving them to new clusters, to relieve the pressure on the main cluster (customers with heavy requirements are still recommended managed dedicated clusters – these will be available to purchase simply as additional products soon). We’re using puppet to automate a lot of the setup of the new clusters and can deploy a new one, with monitoring and backups, very quickly.

This work has almost quadrupled the shared MySQL resources within the space of a couple of weeks, and provides a simple platform to continue scaling indefinitely. The decentralisation also makes some aspects of administration easier, such as arranging downtime for maintenance.

The visible differences are small: rather than everyone connecting to one address, sqlreadwrite.brightbox.net, each account needs to use the address provided in the control panel. The old sqlreadwrite.brightbox.net has become db01.mysql.vm.brightbox.net (the old name will of course continue to work indefinitely), and the new clusters are at db02.mysql.vm.brightbox.net, db03.mysql.vm.brightbox.net etc. Our wiki documentation has been updated to reflect this – customers on the old cluster don’t have to make any changes, it only really affects new customers and customers we’ve contacted to arrange a move.

We’ve also been working on improving the slow query logger to provide more useful results. Instead of reporting every slow query ever logged, it produces an intelligent summary of the week’s queries. This means when you see a slow query in the control panel, it means it’s shown up repeatedly and very likely needs attention, as opposed to queries that just happened to take longer than usual due to load on the cluster. We’ll be rolling this work out just after Christmas.

This work represents a big investment in our shared MySQL platform, which we know is invaluable to a lot of our customers, and allows us to keep growing without sacrificing performance.