Why DB clustering is really awesome to scale a monolith project?

Hey folks,

Have you ever heard about DB Clustering (eg MySQL Clustering)? If not, I would give you a quick summary of it.

Before, I worked at a big company based in Munich, Germany (Still working in Vietnam tho haha). Oh boy, they do have a big monolith monster project, the size, code,...

Man, imagine you have to scale a project like that, millions of users (from public to internal), the DB write operations are insane.

There is no way a traditional 1 write - N replica would work. Write instance will and always be a bottleneck.

Then, here I welcome you to the DB Clustering!

DB Clustering details and the Pros

Just like how you deploy your backend project and put it under a Load Balancer, then share the traffic between the instances.

DB Clustering is just as same as that:

Shared-nothing: my machine, my usage
Sync replication: crazy right? replication for replica is async
Self-healing
Automatic failover
Load-balancing
High availability

Awesome right?

In Tech, there will be no silver bullet for everything. Same as clustering, it would have its own Cons, eg:

Self-managed (yeah, seems like cloud services still prefer the traditional way - write replica)
- But once you perfect the setup (self-healing, fail-over,...), you're done.
Some limitations, check out MySQL

But the PROs here are way better to go with.

Clustering Sample Chart from SethPhat

Apply to a Monolith Project

With the PROs above, for example, I have an App with MAU (monthly active users) of around 1M. Here would be my perfect setup:

Backend:
- Load Balancer: 4 instances, using the round-robin algorithm.
DB:
- 5 clusters:
  - 4 active, using the round-robin algorithm.
  - 1 standby, will jump in if any active instance is down.

If I needed a Queue Worker, then I would give it a dedicated cluster as well 🥳 Thus, it can work independently without taking all the resources from the HTTP layer.

Then I don't have to bother about the monolith structure (yes I know it is bad), but extracting a big app into multiple services aka microservices would take years without new features.

And I can sleep in peace without worrying about spiking in the database when the write operations are high as fk.

Conclusion

Small/medium app (even big): let's go with the DB Clustering to help you scale while you're only focusing on the feature development.
Super big app: DB Clustering for your own microservices.

Cheers!

Why DB clustering is really awesome to scale a monolith project?

Comments

Tech tips

Install ImgMagick for PHP on MacOS

More from this blog

Fetch and compute first, write later

Mark as default - the optimal way

Almost 2026, but I still choose WordPress for CMS

Laravel Excel: How to append rows to an existing Excel file

Laravel Herd PRO reviews

DB Clustering details and the Pros

Apply to a Monolith Project

Conclusion

Command Palette

Comments

Tech tips

Install ImgMagick for PHP on MacOS

More from this blog

DB Clustering details and the Pros

Apply to a Monolith Project

Conclusion