Introduction
For critical data systems, downtime is unacceptable. This case study outlines how we built a cross-datacenter, self-healing MySQL cluster using Percona XtraDB, providing fault tolerance and seamless replication between geographic regions.
The Challenge
The organization ran a monolithic MySQL instance serving analytics and financial data. Key pain points:
- No HA or disaster recovery
- Manual failover process
- Inability to scale read/write load
The Solution
We implemented a Percona XtraDB Cluster across two data centers:
- 3-node Galera-based cluster with quorum-aware HA
- ProxySQL in front of the cluster for read/write split and failover logic
- Asynchronous replication to a fallback node in the DR site
- Monitoring with PMM and custom Prometheus exporters
The Results
- Automatic failover across data centers
- Read scaling without replication lag
- DR-ready in case of site-wide outage
- Improved performance under concurrent reporting loads
Conclusion
With Percona XtraDB and the right design, MySQL can be both distributed and highly available. This project gave the client confidence in their data layer – no matter where failure strikes.
