News

MariaDB Speeds Deployment with Docker, Chef Support

• By David Ramel
• July 15, 2015

MariaDB Corp. today announced the Summer 2015 release of its open source database distribution, claiming "developer enablement" and speedier app deployment via new support for Docker containers and Chef recipes and cookbooks.

MariaDB Enterprise is the subscription-based, commercial umbrella distribution based on the open source MariaDB project, self-described as "a drop-in replacement for MySQL."

The company said the summer release provides improved security and reliability for DevOps, with the new Docker and Chef support easing deployment procedures.

"Developers can now easily deploy and run their database applications thanks to our Docker container and Chef cookbook and scripts," the company said.

Docker is leading the exploding container industry, which lets developers bundle their applications with all required dependencies into a standardized package guaranteed to run and perform the same wherever it's used.

Chef is a tool that turns infrastructure into code, automating the process of building, deploying and managing that infrastructure via recipes that contain configuration data.

The company noted that MariaDB has become the default database included in major software distributions such as Red Hat and SUSE Linux OSes. It positioned its enterprise-optimized database as one component of heterogeneous environments that might even include other databases.

MariaDB quoted research firm Gartner Inc. as saying, "We find many of our clients adopting a dual-RDBMS strategy: an open-source RDBMS combined with one of the commercial DBMS engines. We also find that many clients are beginning to use OSDBMS for more applications than originally planned."

That thought was echoed by John Myers at Enterprise Management Associates. "MariaDB's Summer release is well aligned with the trend by enterprises to adopt and use multiple data platforms in concert; no one platform can do all things," Myers said. "As customers look for faster time to implementation and a shorter time to insight from their data, MariaDB's elastic database platform's new functionality enables organizations to implement and derive value more rapidly."

The new release also includes new ability to launch scripts and send e-mail notifications through event triggers; client-side SSL support; integrated failure detection and failover; improved subscription management and more.

Several of those features are enabled by the optional MaxScale technology. The company said the new release "offers users the option to deploy MaxScale, a database-aware proxy platform that provides capabilities such as load balancing, sharding and firewall protection without the need to modify existing applications."

The new release, including MaxScale, is available immediately. Subscription details are available here.