MariaDB reduce admin overhead for DevOps teams

Open source database specialist MariaDB announced today that it has integrated data streaming via Apache Kafka and other data sources with its MariaDB MaxScale 2.0 database proxy. The new version also adds enterprise security and high availability features.

Together, MariaDB says the improvements significantly reduce administration overhead for DevOps teams. MariaDB is an open source fork of the MySQL relational database management system (RDBMS). The MaxScale software, released last year, is intended to serve as a gateway between the application layer and the database layer. The idea is to decouple apps from the database, making it easier for administrators to make changes to the backend infrastructure without bringing down apps and vice versa.

“To stay competitive, enterprises need to be highly responsive to allow for changes to web applications without downtime to the application or backend infrastructure,” Roger Bodamer, chief product officer at MariaDB, said in a statement today. “MariaDB MaxScale decouples admin functionality from the database so the database and applications run at peak performance at scale. This decoupling enables businesses to iterate quickly to support the speed of innovation.”

Multiple side of MaxScale

MaxScale consists of a multi-threaded, event-driven engine, with its main functionality provided by plugins loaded at runtime. The plugins can handle the scalability and availability of database clusters, and also secure them and manage the maintenance downtime.

“MaxScale acts as multiple different agents — like a database firewall or a query router — and has a plug-in architecture, which makes it easy to extend and customize,” Bodamer says. “Its lightweight, high-speed networking core is designed for scale, performance and throughput. Based on this core, you can utilize existing modules — authentication, filter and log, protocol, monitor, router, or customize and build new modules based on your needs.”

The latest version, now generally available, adds new features, including the following:

• Data streaming. MaxScale 2.0 adds support for real-time analytics and machine learning applications through the addition of change data capture (CDC), which captures and streams all transactional data changes, making the data accessible to big data stores using messaging systems (like Kafka). “MaxScale can now replicate binlog events from MariaDB to Kafka,” Bodamer says. “Data is sent to data lake environments like Hadoop or other data warehouses, which allows users to leverage real-time data for machine learning or real-time analytics.”
• Enterprise security. MariaDB has updated MaxScale’s advanced database firewall feature with end-to-end SSL to prevent unauthorized access, and says security enhancements to MaxAdmin will prevent attackers from gaining access and damaging configurations. Additionally, MariaDB has added connection rate limitations to prevent DDoS attacks.
• High availability. MaxScale 2.0 adds a new feature to its high availability solution to ensure read transactions aren’t affected when nodes fail, minimizing downtime.

“We’re investing heavily into analytics,” Madan Sugumar, application architect, Insitutional Banking, DBS Bank, said in a statement today. “The data streaming capabilities offered with MaxScale 2.0 will be a powerful new tool to stream the data from our MariaDB database and our Hadoop clusters. Ability to stream data from our OLTP MariaDB database to our Hadoop cluster in real time is critical for us to have real-time insight into our customer data. We’re excited to add this to our current MaxScale environment.”