Even Easier Master Promotion (and High Availability) for MySQL (no need to touch any slave)

Dealing with the failure of a MySQL master is not simple.  The most common solution is to promote a slave as the new master but in an environment where you have many slaves, the asynchronous implementation of replication gets in your way.  The problem is that each slave might be in a different state:

• some could be very close to the dead master,
• some could be missing the latest transactions,
• and some could be far behind (lagging, delayed slaves, or slaves in maintenance).