Start MariaDB in K8s

This is the first in a series of blogs explaining how to use MariaDB in Kubernetes (K8s), as well as explaining some important concepts of K8s and of MariaDB.

This blog explains how to start MariaDB as a stateless application in K8s using the CLI and explores different commands you can run on your CLI.

The prerequisites are that you have installed kubectl (which will also install Docker runtime) and minikube (local K8s).

Let’s first start the minikube

$ minikube start && kubectl get nodes
NAME STATUS ROLES AGE VERSION
minikube Ready control-plane,master 104d v1.22.2

The Pod is a K8s resource and the smallest unit in K8s.

New Sponsor: Schaffhausen Institute of Technology

Good news from and for MariaDB Foundation: in Schaffhausen Institute of Technology (SIT), we have a new Platinum Sponsor. With the additional funds and with the insights provided by Serguei Beloussov, who will work with the MariaDB Foundation on the board level, we expect to improve our ability to further the MariaDB Foundation mission related to our values of Openness, Adoption, and Continuity.

Introducing SIT

This event marks a first in our work with sponsors, given that our top-level sponsor list has so far contained only names fairly familiar to industry players: DBS Bank, Visma, IBM, Microsoft, Alibaba, Tencent, and Service Now, not to mention the eponymous MariaDB Corporation.

We stand with Ukraine

This is a difficult blog entry to write. It involves war. But not a flame war. A real war where people are dying. Innocent people. You have all seen the pictures and videos, it is not my task to describe that.

MariaDB Foundation has been slow to react. This is because we have strong ties to both Ukrainian and Russian developers and we want to do the right thing, as individuals and as the Foundation. Let it be perfectly clear that MariaDB Foundation stands with Ukraine; that said, the rest of the blog is not written in first person plural.

New Service – quay.io/mariadb-foundation/mariadb-devel

During the development of MariaDB, a lot of things are tested. However the most important workload to be tested is the one we don’t have access to, and that is your workload.

As many of you run your own CI, we’d like you to invite you to join the testing of MariaDB. quay.io/mariadb-foundation/mariadb-devel is a container repository using the latest from our main stable branches. By the time any code gets into these branches it has been reviewed and passed our tests. The developers of the change consider it finished, so this is the perfect time to take this code and test it on your workload.

Docker Library – Official MariaDB Image Maintenance

The Docker Library official MariaDB image is now maintained by the MariaDB Foundation, and has been for the last six months. If you didn’t notice, we’ll take that as a compliment, as the previous maintainers of Docker Library from Infosiftr were doing a good job already. Infosiftr still provide valuable quality assurance on the releases before they get to you.

What’s Changed?

What we have done, with assistance from you, our community, is:

Timezones

  • Continued the parting contribution by Infosiftr MARIADB_* environment names and added MARIADB_INITDB_SKIP_TZINFO for consistency.
  • Allowed the timezone to be changed.

Debian/Ubuntu packaging expert wanted

MariaDB Foundation needs help from a Debian/Ubuntu packaging expert to continue to provide high value MariaDB Server packaging.

MariaDB Server is packaged in Debian and Ubuntu distributions, and by MariaDB Foundation as a upstream repository. A significant effort occurred to make this possible and stable. MariaDB Foundation wants to continue to innovate in the packaging to provide the best out-of-the-box experience for our users. To ensure this innovation remains stable and considered for the wide range of Debian/Ubuntu users we require a person/company/collective, with a very high quality of packaging and communication skills, to work within the MariaDB community ecosystem to deliver this outcome.

Business As Unusual, Part II

On the last day of the year, let me share a few thoughts in hindsight on a year that didn’t turn out as anyone expected. The outcome: Not everyone was as lucky as MariaDB Foundation. The pandemic takes longer than expected, and mixes the deck of winners and losers. Sure, most of us lose, a lot. But the forced break can provide lessons for a better post-pandemic life (and business).

Picture: Sanna Marin, PM of Finland, CC BY 4.0 Laura Kotila/Statsrådets kansli 2019 via Wikimedia Commons

Two early pandemic blog entries in March

Background: In March this year (which sometimes feels like yesterday, sometimes like ages ago), I wrote two blog entries about the strange situation caused by the Corona pandemic.

Thank you, 2020

At MariaDB Foundation, we have many reasons to be thankful towards all of those who have helped us during 2020.

A few sample contributions

We have recently expressed our gratitude towards contributors in our ecosystem, in 2020. Daniel Black explicitly thanked Tencent for their contributions, and Vicentiu Ciorbaru for the ARM related contributions.

On the same note, Intel has given us access to hardware and software to enable builds using Intel compilers, but more on that once we can release these new builds.