Open Stack

Excerpts from Avishay Traeger's message of 2015-02-04 22:19:53 -0800:
> On Wed, Feb 4, 2015 at 11:00 PM, Robert Collins <robertc at robertcollins.net>
> wrote:
> 
> > On 5 February 2015 at 10:24, Joshua Harlow <harlowja at outlook.com> wrote:
> > > How interesting,
> > >
> > > Why are people using galera if it behaves like this? :-/
> >
> > Because its actually fairly normal. In fact its an instance of point 7
> > on https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/BasicDesignTenets - one of our
> > oldest wiki pages :).
> >
> 
> When I hear MySQL I don't exactly think of eventual consistency (#7),
> scalability (#1), horizontal scalability (#4), etc.
> For the past few months I have been advocating implementing an alternative
> to db/sqlalchemy, but of course it's a huge undertaking.  NoSQL (or even
> distributed key-value stores) should be considered IMO.  Just some food for
> thought :)
> 

I know it is popular to think that MySQL* == old slow and low-scale, but
that is only popular with those who have not actually tried to scale
MySQL. You may want to have a chat with the people running MySQL at
Google, Facebook, and a long tail of not quite as big sites but still
massively bigger than most clouds. Note that many of the people who
helped those companies scale up are involved directly with OpenStack.

The NoSQL bits that are popular out there make the easy part easy. There
is no magic bullet for the hard part, which is when you need to do both
synchronous and asynchronous. Factor in its maturity and the breadth of
talent available, and I'll choose MySQL for this task every time.

* Please let's also give a nod to our friends working on MariaDB, a
  MySQL-compatible fork that many find preferrable and for the purposes
  of this discussion, equivalent.