Boosted performance, enhanced security, and a future-ready database

When you're running 4,000 individual MySQL databases, monitoring everything is akin to trying to watch a movie through a kaleidoscope. Our enterprise customer needed to pull all that data into Amazon Redshift: the customers' BI and analytics could be run from one trusted warehouse, but they needed nightly updates to ensure the insights were always current, and the migrations could not break production dashboards.

Challenges

They ran into a few challenges including:

• End-of-life software: MySQL 5.7 was no longer patched for security leaving the platform vulnerable.
• Performance & failover implications: The old version suffered from incompatibility with optimizers and replication that hurt reliability.
• Compatibility issues: Modern frameworks were dropping support for 5.7 and slowing future development projects.

The Solution

• We followed common upgrade procedures in moving the data and the configuration from MySQL 5.7 to MySQL 8.
• We decided the best fit for the client was to run a blue-green deployment.
• Setting up the new version in tandem, syncing the data and traffic, and then switching once the tests were successful.

The Impact

• Faster queries and better responsiveness - the improved optimizer in MySQL 8 achieved faster results all around to clients.
• Improved security - with the updates, authentication and encryption were at improved levels, etc., thus lowering risk and protecting sensitive data.
• A future-proofed stack - with a supported version, future integrations/upgrades will be compatible.