In my previous posts I wrote about my set-up of MariaDB Galera on Kubernetes. Now I have some first experience with this set-up and can provide some guidance. I used an ill-fated TCP health-check that lead to MariaDB Galera blocking the originating IPv4 address from accessing the cluster due to never completing a MySQL handshake and it seems (logs are gone) that this lead to the sync between different systems breaking too.

When I woke up my entire cluster was down and didn’t recover. Some pods restarted and I run into a Azure Kubernetes bug where a Persistent Storage would be umounted but not detached. This means the storage can not be re-attached to the new pod. The Microsoft upstream project is a bit hostile but the issue is known. If you are seeing an error about the storage still being detached/attached. You can go to the portal, find the agent that has it attached and detach it by hand.

To bring the cluster back online there is a chicken/egg problem. The entrypoint.sh discovers the members of the cluster by using environment variables. If the cluster is entirely down and the first pod is starting, it will just exit as it can’t connect to the others. My first approach was to keep the other nodes down and use kubectl edit rc/galera-node-X and set replicas to 0. But then the service is still exporting the information. In the end I deleted the srv/galera-node-X and waited for the first pod to start. Once it was up I could re-create the services again.

My next steps are to add proper health checks, some monitoring and see if there is a more long term archive for the log data of a (deleted) pod.