Some months ago, Shlomi Noah published a series about Service Discovery. In his posts, Shlomi describes many ways for an application to find the master. He also gives detail on how these solutions cope with failover to a slave, including their integration with Orchestrator.

This is a great series, and I recommend its reading for everybody implementing master failover, with or without Orchestrator, and even if you are not fully automating the process yet. Taking a step back, I realized that service discovery is only one of the five parts of a full MySQL Master Failover Strategy, and this post is about these five parts. In some follow-up posts, I might analyze some deployments using the framework presented in this post.