MySQL Master High Availability and Failover: more thoughts

Some months ago, Shlomi Noach published a series about Service Discovery.  In his posts, Shlomi describes many ways for an application to find the master.  He also gives detail on how these solutions cope with failing-over to a slave, including their integration with Orchestrator.

This is a great series, and I recommend its reading for everybody implementing master failover, with or without Orchestrator, even if you are not fully automating the process yet.  Taking a step back, I realized that service discovery is only one of the five parts of a full MySQL Master Failover Strategy; this post is about these five parts.  In some follow-up posts, I might analyze some deployments using the framework presented in this post.

Binlog Servers for Simplifying Point in Time Recovery

A common way to implement point in time recovery capability is:

1. to regularly do a full backup of a database,
2. and to save the binary logs of that database (or from its master if doing backups on a slave).

When point in time recovery is required you need to:

1. restore a backup,
2. and apply the binary logs up to the point of recovery.

(Step # 2 and # b above are the ones that will be simplified by using Binlog Servers.)