My Galera set-up on Kubernetes and the Azure LoadBalancer in front of it seem to work nicely but one big TODO is to implement proper health checks. If a node is down, in maintenance or split from the network it should not be part of the LoadBalancer. The Azure LoadBalancer has support for custom HTTP probes and I wanted to write something very simple that handles the HTTP GET, opens a MySQL connection to the destination, check if it is connected to a primary. As this is about health checks the code should be small and reliable.

To improve my Go(-lang) skills I decided to write my healthcheck in Go. And it seemed like a good idea, Go has a powerful HTTP package, a SQL API package and two MySQL implementations. So the entire prototype is just about 72 lines (with comments and empty lines) and I think that qualifies as small. Prototyping the MySQL code took some iterations but in general it went quite quickly. But how reliable is it? Go introduced the nice concept of a context.Context. So any operation should be associated with a context and it should be passed as argument from one method to another. One can create a child context and associate it with a deadline (absolute time) or timeout (relative) and has a way to cancel it.

I grabbed the Context from the HTTP Request, added a timeout and called a function to do the MySQL check. Wow that was easy. Some polish to parse the parameters from the CLI and I am ready to deploy it! But let’s see how reliable it is?

I imagined the following error conditions:

1. The destination IP is reachable but no one listening on the port. The TCP connection will fail quickly (SYN -> RST,ACK)
2. The destination IP ends in a blackhole (no RST, ACK) received. One would have a large connect timeout
3. The Galera node (or machine hosting it) is overloaded. While the connect succeeds the authentication or a query might stall
4. The Galera node is split and not a master

The first and fourth error conditions are easy to test/simulate and trivial to implement properly. I then moved to the third one. My first choice was to implement an infinitely slow Galera node and did that by using nc -l 3006 to accept a TCP connection and then send nothing. I made a healthprobe and waited… and waited.. no timeout. Not after 2s as programmed in the context, not after 2min and not after.. (okay I gave up after 30 min). Pretty discouraging!

After some reading and browsing I saw an open PR to add context.Context support to the MySQL backend. I modified my import, ran go get to fetch it, go build and retested. Okay that didn’t work either. So let’s try the other MySQL implementation, again change the package imports, go get and go build and retest. I picked the wrong package name but even after picking the right package this driver failed to parse the Database URL. At that point I decided to go back to the first implementation and have a deeper look.

So while many of the SQL API methods take a Context as argument, the Open one does not. Open says it might or might not connect to the database and in case of MySQL it does connect to it. Let’s see if there is a workaround? I could spawn a Go routine and have a selective receive on the result or a timeout. While this would make it possible to respond to the HTTP request it does create two issues. First one can’t cancel Go routines and I would leak memory, but worse I might run into a connection limit of the Galera node. What about other workarounds? It seems I can play with a custom parameter for readTimeout and writeTimeout and at least limit the timeout per I/O operation. I guess it takes a bit of tuning to find good values for a busy system and let’s hope that context.Context will be used more in more places in the future.