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A Guide to Implement ProxySQL with Amazon RDS as a Backend

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Introduction

In today’s dynamic and scalable environments, a robust database proxy solution is becoming increasingly important. ProxySQL, a powerful open-source SQL-aware proxy, enables efficient database management and high availability. This blog post will guide you through implementing ProxySQL with Amazon RDS as the backend database, ensuring optimized performance and seamless database operations.

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Understanding ProxySQL and its Benefits

ProxySQL is a high-performance, SQL-aware proxy between the application and the database. It acts as an intermediary, providing load balancing, query routing, caching, and failover features.

By implementing ProxySQL with RDS as the backend, you can achieve several benefits, including:

  1. Load Balancing: ProxySQL distributes the database load across multiple backend nodes, ensuring optimal utilization of resources and improved performance.
  2. Query Routing: ProxySQL intelligently routes queries based on predefined rules, allowing you to direct read and write queries to specific replicas or partitions.
  3. Connection Pooling: ProxySQL efficiently manages connections to the backend database, reducing overhead and enhancing scalability.
  4. High Availability: ProxySQL monitors the health of backend nodes and automatically redirects traffic to available nodes in case of failures, improving system uptime.
  5. Query Caching: ProxySQL can cache frequently executed queries, reducing the load on the backend database and improving response times.

Prerequisites

Before we proceed with the implementation, make sure you have the following prerequisites in place:

  • An AWS account with access to Amazon RDS.
  • An RDS instance is running MySQL or MariaDB.
  • A separate server or Amazon EC2 instance is used to install and configure ProxySQL.

Steps to Set up ProxySQL

To install ProxySQL, follow these steps:

Step 1: Log in to your server or EC2 instance.

Step 2: Add the ProxySQL repository to your package manager:

Step 3: Install ProxySQL:

Configuring ProxySQL:

Once ProxySQL is installed, follow these steps to configure it:

Step 1: Access the ProxySQL administration interface

Step 2: Set Admin password Load them to runtime and save to disk

Step 3: Create a user for monitoring in primary database

Step 4: Configure ProxySQL to monitor backend connections

Step 5: Configure ProxySQL to connect with the backend RDS instance

Note: Replace ‘RDS_ENDPOINT’ with the endpoint of your RDS instance.

Step 6: Configure ProxySQL to route queries to the backend

ProxySQL allows you to route queries based on various conditions, such as SQL patterns, users, or schema. The following query will insert query rules in ProxySQL to direct read queries to specific RDS replicas.

Step 7: Create read only user with read permissions in a primary database for the proxysql server to access the database

Step 8: Configure ProxySQL to handle client connections

Step 9: In RDS Console”Network & Security” section and modify the security group settings to allow inbound traffic from the ProxySQL server. Specify the IP address or security group associated with the ProxySQL server.

Testing and Verifying the Setup

Once ProxySQL and RDS are configured, you can test the setup by connecting a client application to ProxySQL and verifying the query routing and load balancing.

Step 1: Connect to ProxySQL from a MySQL client application using the ProxySQL server’s IP address and the configured username and password. Execute any select queries and validate.

Step 2: Monitor the query routing using the ProxySQLAdmin interface:

Conclusion

In this blog post, we explored the implementation of ProxySQL with Amazon RDS as the backend. We covered the installation and configuration of ProxySQL and the necessary steps to configure Amazon RDS and test the setup. By implementing ProxySQL, you can enhance your database infrastructure’s performance, scalability, and availability.

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About CloudThat

CloudThat is a leading provider of Cloud Training and Consulting services with a global presence in India, the USA, Asia, Europe, and Africa. Specializing in AWS, Microsoft Azure, GCP, VMware, Databricks, and more, the company serves mid-market and enterprise clients, offering comprehensive expertise in Cloud Migration, Data Platforms, DevOps, IoT, AI/ML, and more.

CloudThat is the first Indian Company to win the prestigious Microsoft Partner 2024 Award and is recognized as a top-tier partner with AWS and Microsoft, including the prestigious ‘Think Big’ partner award from AWS and the Microsoft Superstars FY 2023 award in Asia & India. Having trained 850k+ professionals in 600+ cloud certifications and completed 500+ consulting projects globally, CloudThat is an official AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, Microsoft Gold Partner, AWS Training PartnerAWS Migration PartnerAWS Data and Analytics PartnerAWS DevOps Competency PartnerAWS GenAI Competency PartnerAmazon QuickSight Service Delivery PartnerAmazon EKS Service Delivery Partner AWS Microsoft Workload PartnersAmazon EC2 Service Delivery PartnerAmazon ECS Service Delivery PartnerAWS Glue Service Delivery PartnerAmazon Redshift Service Delivery PartnerAWS Control Tower Service Delivery PartnerAWS WAF Service Delivery PartnerAmazon CloudFront Service Delivery PartnerAmazon OpenSearch Service Delivery PartnerAWS DMS Service Delivery PartnerAWS Systems Manager Service Delivery PartnerAmazon RDS Service Delivery PartnerAWS CloudFormation Service Delivery PartnerAWS ConfigAmazon EMR and many more.

FAQs

1. How does ProxySQL handle failover and high availability?

ANS: – ProxySQL ensures high availability by monitoring the status and health of backend database servers. In a failure, it automatically redirects client connections to a healthy server, minimizing downtime. It can monitor server status and replication lag or use custom scripts for failover.

2. What is the role of ProxySQL in a MySQL/MariaDB setup?

ANS: – ProxySQL acts as a high-performance proxy between client applications and database servers. It improves performance and scalability by load balancing client requests across multiple servers. It also provides query routing, rewriting, connection pooling, and query caching functionalities.

WRITTEN BY Dharshan Kumar K S

Dharshan Kumar is a Research Associate at CloudThat. He has a working knowledge of various cloud platforms such as AWS, Microsoft, ad GCP. He is interested to learn more about AWS's Well-Architected Framework and writes about them.

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