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MercadoLibre Chooses Galera Cluster
to Scale Without Limits in OpenStack
Mercado offers a complete technological and commercialsolution that addresses the distinctive cultural andgeographic challenges of operating an on-‐‑line tradingplatform in South America. MercadoLibre was recognized inrecent years as one of the top thirty of the worldʼ’s hottestbrands.
With its success and growth, MercadoLibreʼ’s reliance ontechnology accelerated and its data center was fillingrapidly with physical servers, as well as with data. Toaccelerate things, MercadoLibreʼ’s IT staff began to virtualizemuch of their data center.
Virtualization saved them time in managing physicalservers, reduced the data center space and electrical powerthat was needed, and enabled them to create more quicklynew servers. By moving to cloud computing, though,MercadoLibreʼ’s IT staff knew there had to be moreefficiencies and an improved end-‐‑user experience to begained. They wanted their internal users to be able to createtheir own servers, virtual machines, storage, and networks.They knew that they could give their users that ability withthe right cloud computing platform. Users would be ableinstantly to provision themselves with what they needed,without having to wait for a system administrator to createan instance.
To achieve those efficiencies and improvements,MercadoLibre chose OpenStack for several reasons,including its flexibility and its ability to scale. Scalability isalso what led them to Galera Cluster for its massive increasein data volumes.
Challenges
Mercadoʼ’s main challenges in terms of their data &database strategy were of a technical nature. The active-‐‑standby schema of MySQL Cluster or DRBD didnʼ’t scaleproperly for them. They needed an actual active-‐‑activesolution that would scale simply in procesing power whenadding more nodes without having to deal with failingfailovers. They wanted to scale without limits.
Their private OpenStack Cloud is constantly growing withmore services being added. They needed a solution thatwould scale with the same speed and ease as their cloud tosupport the data growth. They needed to find a solution toreplace their existing database that consisted of MySQL withHeartbeat, as well as DRBD (active – backup) solutionschema.
Solution
Quick Facts
Established in 1999Retail IndustryAbout 5,000employees
1500 Ubuntu Linuxservers
Headquarters inBuenos Aires,Argentina
Related Sites
MercadoLibreOpenStackCodership
About Mercado
MercadoLibre is the largest e-‐‑commerce ecosystem in Latin America.It provides an on-‐‑line trading platformin which 58 million consumers use tobuy and sell a variety of consumeritems and much more in SouthAmerica.
Mercado, the company behindMercadoLibre, offers a wide range ofservices to its sellers and buyersthroughout the region, includingmarketplace, payments, advertisingand e-‐‑building solutions. It operates inthirteen countries across SouthAmerica. Based on unique visitors andpage views, it is a market leader in themajor countries where it operates.
The Mercado staff knew from the outset thatthey would want to implement an opensource solution for their database strategy.They considered at first PostgreSQL XL, buteventually opted for Galera Cluster. Therewere several reasons for chosing Galera
Cluster, one of them being that their database of choicealso needed to be supported by OpenStack. The three mostimportant criteria for their evalutation were scalability,avoidance of dealing with failing fail-‐‑overs in a no-‐‑go highavailability schema, and guaranteed data persistence,consistency and availability.
They decided finally to implement Galera Cluster for thefollowing reasons:
Active replication;Active – active schema;Failoverless design;Cost (no licence fees); andScalability.
The overall solutions is a well thought through combinationof technologies: They used Openstack for cloudorchestration and deployment with about 1,200 physicalservers and more than 10,000 virtual machines. The Galeraclients are mainly the Openstack nodes and theirorchestrator for managing APIʼ’s uses Python andSQLAlchemy to interact with MySQL. The Galera Clusterconsists of 9 nodes (8 actives – 1 NOR) balanced by an F5bigIP load balancer with more than 80 databases across thecluster and over 700 querys per second per node.
Implementing Galera Cluster took little time, mostlybecause itʼ’s very easy to use and to understand. They testedinitially the solution for about three months and then wentinto production, as there was some urgency to replace theirexisting MySQL solution. Now, if they need to scale they justadd nodes without downtime or any similar challengeswhich they faced previously.
The staff took advantage of Codershipʼ’s support, trainingand consulting services, which proved very beneficial. Thiscontributed to significant performance improvements andhelped them significantly throughout the course of theproject.
Results
Now that their new database solution isdeployed, MercadoLibre reports great costsavings, scalability that will lead to further
cost savings and an ease of deployment that wasnʼ’tpossible before. Just as crucially, they now enjoy realavailability.
“No downtime leads to revenue and the best userexperience; and for an e-‐‑commerce site that meanseverything.”, their staff noted. Their new solution providesthem with many advantages they didnʼ’t have before:dynamic scaling with no downtime; 100% availability, allyear long; and active / active query handling.
MercadoLibre expects its business to grow even faster, butthe IT staff no longer will have to spend so much time
About Codership
Codership Oy provides highavailability, no-‐‑data-‐‑loss and scalabledata replication and clusteringsolutions for open source databases.Codership's flagship product is GaleraCluster™ for MySQL, a TrueMultimaster Cluster based onsynchronous replication. GaleraCluster is an easy-‐‑to-‐‑use, high-‐‑availability solution which provideshigh system uptime, no data loss andscalability for future growth. For moreinformation about Galera Cluster,please contact [email protected]
deploying and managing their infrastructure. Theirdevelopers will be able to provision automatically with theresources they need. “Weʼ’re opening two more data centersin the U.S. and our cloud solutions are going to be hostedthere. Naturally, the data is going to be handled by MySQLGalera clusters.”
They staff at MercadoLibre added that “[they] could not behappier with the product and the support provided by theCodership staff. Itʼ’s just great and we encourage everyoneto try it and use it. Of course, one needs to consider thingssuch as locking in a shared active-‐‑active schema in theapplication or abstraction layer, but we donʼ’t see that as adownside to the solution, itʼ’s simply the nature of it. Welove Galera Cluster and we invite anyone who is intersted tocheck out our implementation.”
Copyright 2014, Codership Oy. All Rights Reserved.Galera, Galera Cluster, Galera Replication are trademarks of Codership Oy.
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