Automating MySQL Backups at Facebook Scale
Eric Barrett (Facebook) describes the process used for backing up Facebook’s MySQL cluster1:
Backups are not the most glamorous type of engineering. They are technical, repetitive, and when everything works, nobody notices. They are also cross-discipline, requiring systems, network, and software expertise from multiple teams. But ensuring your memories and connections are safe is incredibly important, and at the end of the day, incredibly rewarding.
If you’d want to make it sound simple, just enumerate the steps:
- Binary logs and
mysqldump - Hadoop DFS
- Long-term storage
Then start asking how you’d accomplish this. With 1 server. With more servers. With more servers while maintaining the availability of the system. See how far you’d be able to answer these questions. At least theoretically.
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As a side note, in Fun with numbers: How much data is Facebook ingesting, I’ve guestimated the number of MySQL servers in the 20k range. This post mentions: “thousands of database servers in multiple regions”. ↩
Original title and link: Automating MySQL Backups at Facebook Scale (©myNoSQL)
