Updates to Percona Kubernetes Operator for Percona XtraDB Cluster

On July 17, 2020, Percona delivered an updated version of our Percona Kubernetes Operator for Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) focused on easing deployment and operations management of a clustered MySQL environment. Included in the Percona Distribution for MySQL, our Operator is based on the best practices for MySQL cluster configuration and setup in Kubernetes. This update adds a variety of important new features including:

• Smart Update to Safely and Reliably Upgrade your PXC Environment Automatically
  We implemented a new update strategy called Smart Update. Smart Update is aware of the context of your environment and minimizes the number of failover events that need to occur to fully upgrade a database cluster.
  For example, if you have a 3 member Percona XtraDB Cluster and Pod 1 is the writer, Smart Update ensures that Pod 0 and Pod 2 are upgraded and restarted first, ensuring that replication version constraints are honored and that only a single failover must occur when Pod 1 goes offline during its upgrade.
• Smart Update Functionality Beyond Upgrade
  In addition to managing failover during an upgrade, Smart Update can be used independently to reliably restart a cluster after an alteration, such as reallocation of resources or changing a password. In these cases, Smart Update again ensures that the entire cluster restart is handled with minimum failover.
• Percona Version Service API for Kubernetes Operators
  The Kubernetes Version Service API, which is an important component for automatic upgrades, can also be called directly. This API describes the version information for the current environment and can be used to assist with decisions to upgrade or when support help is needed.
• Provide HAProxy as the Default Proxy Manager
  HAProxy is a free, fast, and reliable solution offering high availability, load balancing, and proxying. It is now the default proxy manager for Percona XtraDB Cluster because it is more directly compatible with MySQL, and its support of rules-based access control allows users to more easily control access to their database endpoints within a Kubernetes environment.
• Automatic Syncing of MySQL Users into ProxySQL
  If you choose to use ProxySQL with Percona XtraDB Cluster, the Operator now supports automatic synchronization of MySQL users into the ProxySQL user manager.
• Automated Password Rotation for Admin Users
  This enables users to enforce password rotation policies for system users in the Operator for long-running production databases. Using the standard Kubernetes API to change passwords and validate the age of the current password using their own audit systems is now provided.
• Support for Compressed Backups
  When using the Operator to deploy your environment, it is possible to implement LZ4 compression for backups and SST.

To learn more about the latest release of the Percona Kubernetes Operator for Percona XtraDB Cluster, check out the release notes and download the Operator now.

by Rick Golba via Percona Database Performance Blog