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.

This is the first in a series of posts reviewing methods for MySQL master discovery: the means by which an application connects to the master of a replication tree. Moreover, the means by which, upon master failover, it identifies and connects to the newly promoted master.

These posts are not concerned with the manner by which the replication failure detection and recovery take place. I will share orchestrator specific configuration/advice, and point out where cross DC orchestrator/raft setup plays part in discovery itself, but for the most part any recovery tool such as MHA, replication-manager, severalnines or other, is applicable.

We discuss asynchronous (or semi-synchronous) replication, a classic single-master-multiple-replicas setup. A later post will briefly discuss synchronous replication (Galera/XtraDB Cluster/InnoDB Cluster).