MariaDB

This is my stack in Application & Data

JavaScript PHP HTML5 jQuery Redis Amazon EC2 Ubuntu Sass Vue.js Firebase Laravel Lumen Amazon RDS GraphQL MariaDB

My Utilities Tools

Google Analytics Postman Elasticsearch

My Devops Tools

Git GitHub GitLab npm Visual Studio Code Kibana Sentry BrowserStack

My Business Tools

Slack

We initially started out with Heroku as our PaaS provider due to a desire to use it by our original developer for our Ruby on Rails application/website at the time. We were finding response times slow, it was painfully slow, sometimes taking 10 seconds to start loading the main page. Moving up to the next "compute" level was going to be very expensive.

We moved our site over to AWS Elastic Beanstalk , not only did response times on the site practically become instant, our cloud bill for the application was cut in half.

In database world we are currently using Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL also, we have both MariaDB and Microsoft SQL Server both hosted on Amazon RDS. The plan is to migrate to AWS Aurora Serverless for all 3 of those database systems.

Additional services we use for our public applications: AWS Lambda, Python, Redis, Memcached, AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), Amazon Elasticsearch Service, Amazon ElastiCache

Visual Studio Git GitLab MariaDB nginx Linux

Visual Studio 2019 is increasing my productivity incredibly when I building MVC WebAPI and Web project. GitLab is essential tools for me. Issue boards are great as well as Source code safe in GitLab. The most amazing thing is Microsoft's new strategy on .NET enviroment for me. I love .NET Core 's cross platform support. I can deploy my projects on Linux via nginx and .NET Core runtime or self host options. MariaDB become our first choose database option because of its great talents.

We primarily use MariaDB but use PostgreSQL as a part of GitLab , Sentry and @Nextcloud , which (initially) forced us to use it anyways. While this isn't much of a decision – because we didn't have one (ha ha) – we learned to love the perks and advantages of PostgreSQL anyways. PostgreSQLs extension system makes it even more flexible than a lot of the other SQL-based DBs (that only offer stored procedures) and the additional JOIN options, the enhanced role management and the different authentication options came in really handy, when doing manual maintenance on the databases.

We use MariaDB because it is a free open-source SQL database. I was looking for a low-cost technical stack, and SQL database made a huge sense as it is transactional, and offers all the confort of relational queries, which, for me, is better for general purpose database than noSQL alternatives.

MariaDB is the really free drop-in replacement for mysql, which makes it a good default choice. Note that at some point, I plan to support also Post/gre SQL, which is the other famous SQL open-source database in the enterprise world.

Airbnb’s web experience is powered by a Rails monolith, called Monorail, that talks to several different Java services. MySQL databases store business data and are partitioned by functionality, with messages and calendar management, for example, stored separately from the main booking flow in their own databases.

As traffic to the site continued growing, though, “one notable resource issue with MySQL databases [was] the increasing number of database connections from application servers.”

Airbnb uses AWS’s Relational Database Service (RDS) to power their MySQL instances, and “RDS uses the community edition of MySQL server, which employs a one-thread-per-connection model of connection management.” With Airbnb’s scale, this meant that their databases would hit the C10K problem, which states that “there is an upper bound in the number of connections that MySQL server can accept and serve without dramatically increasing the number of threads running, which severely degrades MySQL server performance.”

When an RDS MySQL server hits resource limits, users will have trouble connecting to the site.

MySQL does have dynamic thread pooling, but it’s only available in the enterprise edition; AWS MySQL RDS, though, doesn’t offer this feature, meaning Airbnb didn’t have access to dynamic thread pooling out-of-the-box.

After surveying several options, the team chose MariaDB MaxScale, which is “a MySQL database proxy that supports intelligent query routing in between client applications and a set of backend MySQL servers.”

Instead of using the MariaDB MaxScale off-the-shelf, however, they decided to fork it and implement their own version that would include connection pooling. Other MaxScale features, like request throttling and query blocklisting were implemented as well.

To enable horizontal scaling of the web application, the team deployed a MaxScale database proxy service in between app servers and MySQL servers. Through the service discovery system SmartStack, applications now “discover and connect to the database proxy service instead of the MySQL database,” allowing horizontal scaling to meet capacity demands.

Additionally, new Airbnb MaxScale proxy server instances can be launched to further enable horizontal scaling.