We are happy to announce that ClusterControl is now “Nutanix Ready” for their enterprise cloud platform. By using both solutions in concert, enterprises and service providers now have unparalleled flexibility in where and how they run their open-source database operations. Let’s look at how they do it.

Historically, there have been few alternatives to choose from to automate the provisioning and management of cloud infrastructure, especially for those looking for hybrid, multi-cloud architectures. And the same can be said for the database layer deployed and managed on top, especially for those based on open-source.

Nutanix enables customers to build secure multi-cloud, hybrid infrastructures, while ClusterControl allows them to fully automate the lifecycle management of open-source databases, from the basic to most challenging operations. 

The result? A Private DBaaS solution that simplifies infrastructure and database management through a single pane of glass while allowing the customer to maintain the sovereignty of their architecture, instead of ceding control to traditional providers.

ABSA is one such customer who’s leveraged both to gain greater control and predictability: 

“ClusterControl enabled us to build automation around our hybrid environment for self-service provisioning while being able to determine the patterns of deployments consistently without DBA involvement. The way ClusterControl handles failover, monitoring, and alerting provides peace of mind as to the availability and performance of the databases after deployment.”

- John Van Der Veen, Infrastructure Manager at ABSA Group LTD 

ClusterControl supports MySQL, MariaDB, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, SQL Server on Linux, Redis on Nutanix AHV clusters. If you are currently or are interested in using Nutanix and would like to see firsthand how this combined solution can work for you, check out the below tutorials: 

• Database Automation and Management on Nutanix with ClusterControl 

• Getting Started with ClusterControl and Database Automation on Nutanix AHV 

• Severalnines's ClusterControl is validated on Nutanix AHV

Wrapping up

Combining Nutanix and ClusterControl is just one more way we are working with our partners to bring the full force of modern DBaaS to bear for customers looking to gain more control over their database infrastructure. There’s more to come so be sure to stay up-to-date by subscribing to our blog, RSS feed, and following us on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Have you ever wondered what products MariaDB Enterprise has to offer? Is it different from MariaDB Community? Can I manage them with ClusterControl?

MariaDB provides two distributions of their software — Enterprise and Community. The Community consists of the MariaDB Server, which has Galera embedded; you can use either standard, asynchronous or semi-synchronous replication or, as an alternative, build a MariaDB Cluster based on Galera. Another addition to the Community distribution is MariaDB ColumnStore. MariaDB 10.6 Community comes with ColumnStore 5.5. MariaDB ColumnStore is a columnar analytics database that allows users to create fast reporting queries through a reporting-optimized way of storing the data. Finally, it is also possible to use MaxScale, a proxy developed by MariaDB, for free as long as you use up to two database nodes. This limit, however, means it’s not feasible for any production deployment and might be used as a never-ending trial.

This post will explore products included with MariaDB Enterprise and how it works with ClusterControl.

What Products does the MariaDB Enterprise Platform Include?

MariaDB Enterprise Server

Let’s take a look at the Enterprise offering from MariaDB. MariaDB 10.6 is the enhanced version of the Community version. It comes with features such as an improved MariaDB Enterprise Audit plugin that adds additional options to control the audited events. MariaDB Enterprise Backup is an improved version of MariaBackup, which reduces the optimized lock handling, effectively decreasing the blocking of writers if a backup is running. MariaDB Enterprise Cluster adds additional data-at-rest encryption for Galera, non-blocking DDLs for Galera, and a few other small features.

MariaDB Enterprise ColumnStore

A further difference is in other parts of the package. First, ColumnStore is available in the most recent version — 5.6 or 6.2. MariaDB Enterprise ColumnStore 6, as per MariaDB documentation, comes with new features like disk-based aggregation, which allows you to trade the performance of the aggregation operations for larger data sets that can be aggregated. So far, all data had to fit in memory. Now, it is possible to use disk for aggregation. Another improvement is introducing an LZ4 compression in addition to the already existing Snappy compression. The precision of the DECIMAL data type has also been increased from 18 to 38, and it’s now possible to update transactional data from ColumnStore data. We can execute updates on the InnoDB table that uses data from the ColumnStore table. In the past, only the other way around (updating ColumnStore based on InnoDB data) was supported.

Finally, another significant change between Enterprise and Community ColumnStore offerings is that MariaDB Enterprise ColumnStore comes with an option to deploy multi-node setups, allowing for better scalability and high availability.

MariaDB Xpand

MariaDB Xpand (previously Clustrix) is a database that, while still providing drop-in compatibility with MySQL, allows users to scale out by adding additional nodes to the cluster. MariaDB Xpand is ACID-compliant and provides fault tolerance, high availability, and scalability. On top of that, other features listed on the MariaDB website are parallel query evaluation and execution, columnar indexes, and automated data partitioning.

MaxScale

As we mentioned earlier, MaxScale, even though it is available to download for free, comes with a license that limits its free use to only two backend nodes, making it unusable for most production environments. In the Enterprise offering, MaxScale does not have such limitations, making it a feasible solution for building deployments based on different elements of MariaDB Enterprise. MaxScale supports all of the software included in the MariaDB Enterprise and acts as a core building block for any of the supported topologies. MaxScale can monitor the underlying databases, route the traffic among them, and perform automated actions like failovers should the need arise. This makes it a great solution for controlling the database traffic and dealing with potential issues. Much older versions of MaxScale have been released for the public, but, realistically speaking, the recent version is what’s most interesting feature-wise, thus making MariaDB Enterprise one of the ways to use MaxScale.

How does MariaDB Enterprise work with ClusterControl?

ClusterControl itself does not provide access to MariaDB Enterprise repositories, nor does it allow users to get the MariaDB licenses. However, it can very easily be configured to work with MariaDB Enterprise. As usual, ClusterControl requires SSH connectivity to be in place:

Then we have another step where we can pick the MariaDB version and pass the password for the superuser in MySQL.

ClusterControl, by default, is configured to set up community repositories for MariaDB, but it is possible to pick an option to “Do Not Setup Vendor Repositories”. It is up to the user to configure repositories to use MariaDB Enterprise packages, but once this is done, ClusterControl can be told just to install the packages and not care where they come from. This is an excellent way of installing custom, non-community packages. Just make sure that you picked the correct version of the MariaDB that you have configured the Enterprise repositories for.

Alternatively, especially if you already have MariaDB Enterprise deployed in your environment, you can import those nodes into ClusterControl, given that the SSH connectivity is in place:

This allows ClusterControl to work with existing deployments of MariaDB Enterprise.

Such deployment of MariaDB, no matter if imported or deployed, is fully supported by ClusterControl, both asynchronous replication, and MariaDB Galera Cluster. Should your cluster switch to a non-primary state, backup schedules can be created and executed, failover will happen, replicas will be promoted as necessary, MariaDB cluster nodes will restart, and the whole cluster will be bootstrapped.

As for other elements of the MariaDB Enterprise, ClusterControl supports MaxScale load balancer. The same pattern we explained for the MariaDB database can also be applied here. If you deployed the cluster using existing repositories, MaxScale would be installed as long as it can be downloaded from one of the configured repositories.

Alternatively, it is possible to import the existing MaxScale instance:

This, again, allows you to import your existing environment into ClusterControl.

When imported, ClusterControl provides an interface for MaxScale’s command-line interface:

You can execute different commands directly from the graphical interface of ClusterControl.

As you can see, no matter if you are using MariaDB Community or MariaDB Enterprise, ClusterControl can help you to manage the database and MaxScale load balancer. 

Wrapping Up

Many elect to use MariaDB Enterprise for its advanced features to achieve ACID compliance, high availability, load balancing, security, scalability, and improved backups. Whether you’re using MariaDB Community or MariaDB Enterprise, ClusterControl can help you manage the database and the MaxScale load balancer. If you want to see it all in the works, you can evaluate ClusterControl free for 30 days.

If you go the route of MariaDB Enterprise and want to take advantage of load balancing, check out how to install and configure MaxScale, both manually and with the help of ClusterControl.

Stay in touch for more updates and best practices for managing your open-source-based databases, be sure to follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn, and subscribe to our newsletter.

We are excited to announce the latest release of ClusterControl — version 1.9.3. This release introduces support for Elasticsearch, improvements for audit logging and tracking all user activities in one central location, and the latest improvements for ClusterControl v2.

Key improvement: Elasticsearch support

After changing its license, Elasticsearch effectively prevented cloud and DBaaS providers from offering it as a managed service, leaving customers looking for the full lifecycle automation experience with only two options: Elastic Cloud or shifting their workloads to its fork, OpenSearch.

Neither option is ideal, presenting additional risks such as lock-in or that which comes with adopting an alternative whose future is uncertain. Additionally, Elasticsearch implementations, like search, are ideal for the ClusterControl platform — this is why we decided to support it.

Now, Elasticsearch 7.x and 8.x users of the open-source edition can reliably automate its end-to-end operations in on-prem, hybrid, and cloud environments. Here are the initial features:

• Deploy one node for test or deployment environments

• Deploy three or more nodes for clustered deployments

• Basic user authentication

• TSL/SSL API endpoint encryption

• Backup management with local file storage repositories

• Scaling out master or data nodes

Elasticsearch support represented the bulk of our efforts; however, we were still able to make additional improvements to audit logging and make CCv2 feature complete. Let’s take a look!

Other feature enhancements in CC v1.9.3 and CCv2

Audit logging

• Audit logging improvements to track all user activities in one central location

ClusterControl v2 Features

• Service deployment for MySQL Galera, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, TimescaleDB, and Elasticsearch

• Performance dashboards

• Cloud backups and backup verification

• Load balancers (ProxySQL and HAProxy)

• SSH host health-check

• Maintenance modes

Wrapping Up

ClusterControl 1.9.3’s release is centered around Elasticsearch but includes a few other enhancements that’ll make your lives easier. Be sure to visit our changelog for the full details on the latest features, how to access these features, and how to upgrade to ClusterControl v2.

We’ll be coming out with new content in the coming weeks, particularly around Elasticsearch and best practices for deploying an Elasticsearch database with ClusterControl, so be sure to follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn and subscribe to our newsletter to stay up to date.

The latest release of ClusterControl —v1.9.3—provides support for Elasticsearch, the most popular full-text search and analytics engine around today. By supporting it, we’ve re-opened the door for Elasticsearch users searching for a way to fully automate end-to-end operations.

In this post, we’ll cover the current challenges that Elasticsearch users face and how ClusterControl’s growing support for this technology will change the way users can implement and manage their Elasticsearch databases.

Why Elasticsearch?

Introduced in 2010, Elasticsearch remains the most popular open-source search and analytics engine. In fact, it still maintains a top 10 spot in DB-Engines despite recent license controversy (covered below). Many users flock to Elasticsearch for its ability to provide log analytics, full-text search, business analytics, security analytics, and data visualizations at breakneck speeds.

To put it simply, Elasticsearch will likely keep its edge for the foreseeable future because it is distributable, easily scalable, and extremely fast, making it invaluable for those building modern applications that rely on complex search features, but it’s not without controversy.

Elasticsearch licensing changes have posed difficulties 

Elasticsearch users have run into some obstacles when it comes to options for managing the database after Elastic changed its license in 2021 to a dual licensing structure — Server Side Public License (SSPL) and the Elastic License — to protect its interests from hyperscalers. 

Effectively, this move to a “proprietary-lite” structure not only prevents cloud providers, but traditional DBaaS and other service providers like Aiven and Logz.io from offering managed ELK services. In a countermove, AWS and a number of partners created a fork, OpenSearch.

So now Elasticsearch customers have been left with three options:

1. Self-manage — This is fine if you’ve got the in-house expertise and resources to manage Elasticsearch ops; however, many users don’t and would rather implement full-lifecycle automation atop their deployments due to use cases that indicate large footprints.

2. Elastic Cloud — Pay for Elastic’s managed service and introduce vendor lock-in risks.

3. OpenSearch — Shift your workloads to OpenSearch which can also be a risky move due to its uncertain future, e.g. will Amazon Web Services and its small consortium of committers build enough steam behind it so that it gets maintained and developed.

All three of these options present unavoidable headaches and risks for Elasticsearch users, which is exactly why we decided to add support for Elasticsearch to our database catalog.

Why use ClusterControl for Elasticsearch?

ClusterControl’s support for Elasticsearch means there is still an opportunity for full-lifecycle automation without using Elastic’s own managed service or moving to OpenSearch. With ClusterControl, Elasticsearch 7.x and 8.x users of the open-source edition can now reliably automate database operations on-prem, in the cloud, or in hybrid environments.

So why should Elasticsearch customers consider using ClusterControl to manage its ops?

1. Using ClusterControl is the only way to get out-of-the-box, full-lifecycle automation support for Elasticsearch operations without going to Elastic’s managed service.

That’s because ClusterControl is a database automation platform that you control and not a traditional DBaaS managed by a third party. Result? You get the benefits of both—full access to open-source licenses and a solution to easily deploy, manage and monitor your HA Elasticsearch from a single control plane—without facing license risks.

2. ClusterControl enables customers to deploy environment-agnostic implementations of Elasticsearch.

With ClusterControl, you avoid environment lock-in, a common risk associated with traditional managed services that are either public cloud-based or provide alternative environments tied to a cloud provider’s ecosystem. Instead, you’re free to deploy anywhere you want, whether on-prem, in private and public clouds, or in a hybrid setup.

3. ClusterControl is ideal for search implementations, e.g. modern web apps, that don’t require the paid license features of Elasticsearch, yet require large implementations.

Elasticsearch implementations that require a large, distributed footprint, such as search, can be challenging to operationalize without a dedicated team. ClusterControl simplifies the process by providing one tool to manage the complete stack of database operations.

Ultimately, it boils down to the fact that ClusterControl provides the automation suite of a traditional DBaaS needed to confidently run large-scale deployments of Elasticsearch in any environment without license restrictions. Now, let’s check out ClusterControl’s initial features.

Current ClusterControl+Elasticsearch features

ClusterControl’s current support of Elasticsearch includes the following:

• Available via CLI or ClusterControl v2 UI (find out how to set it up here)

• Deploy one node for test or deployment environments

• Deploy three or more nodes for clustered deployments with master/data roles

• Basic User Authentication with username and password

• TLS/SSL API endpoint encryption

• Backup Management with local file storage repository

For full details on ClusterControl’s 1.9.3 release, visit the changelog.

Wrapping Up

We will continue rolling out more features for Elasticsearch in the upcoming ClusterControl releases. If you’re looking for a way to deploy, manage, and scale your Elasticsearch implementation, you can evaluate ClusterControl free for 30 days—no CC required.

In the meantime, we will be publishing additional blog posts on Elasticsearch use cases and how to implement them, installing Elasticsearch with ClusterControl, and tackling the rest of the ELK Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana). So make sure you stay tuned for more updates by following us on Twitter and LinkedIn and subscribing to our newsletter. Talk soon!

What if there were a new way to do DBaaS that allowed you to reliably scale your open-source database ops without being limited to a specific environment or ceding control of your infrastructure to third-party service providers?

There is with Sovereign DBaaS.

Sovereign DBaaS enables its users to leverage the benefits of modern deployment strategies, e.g. public cloud, hybrid, etc., with additional security, compliance, and risk mitigation. So what exactly is Sovereign DBaaS and why should you choose one?

Join us on June 8 at 11 am EST as Sanjeev Mohan, Principal Analyst at SanjMo and former Gartner Research VP, and Vinay Joosery, CEO of Severalnines, talk about the future of the cloud and database management and introduce a new solution, Sovereign DBaaS.

In this webinar, you’ll learn:

• The state of the cloud and its current challenges
• What is Sovereign DBaaS?
• Key features of Sovereign DBaaS
• Why you should choose a Sovereign DBaaS
• How you can implement Sovereign DBaaS with Severalnines

Save your spot today and don't miss your chance to ask your questions live!