🔥 The DB Grill 🔥

Ah, another dispatch from the "Cloud Native" trenches. How utterly thrilling. Percona has achieved "general availability" for their "Operator for MySQL." One must assume this is an occasion for some sort of celebration among those who believe the solution to every problem is to add another layer of abstraction and wrap it in YAML. Bravo. You've finally managed to take a perfectly functional, if somewhat pedestrian, relational database and bolt it onto the most volatile, ephemeral, and fundamentally unsuitable execution environment imaginable. It’s like watching a child put a jet engine on a unicycle. The enthusiasm is noted; the outcome is preordained.

They speak of a "Kubernetes-native approach." What, precisely, does that mean? Does it mean the database now embraces the native Kubernetes philosophy of treating its own components as disposable cattle? “Oh dear, my primary data node has been unceremoniously terminated by the scheduler to make room for a new microservice that serves cat photos. No matter! The ‘Operator’ will spin up another!” This isn't a robust architecture; it's a frantic, high-wire act performed over a chasm of data loss. They’ve built a system that is in a constant state of near-failure, and they call this resilience. It’s madness.

And the crowning jewel of this farce:

...delivering the consistency required for organizations with business continuity needs.

Consistency? Consistency? In a distributed system, running on an orchestrated network of transient containers, governed by the unforgiving laws of physics? It's as if the CAP theorem was not a foundational theorem of distributed computing, but merely a gentle suggestion they chose to ignore. They speak of "synchronous Group Replication" as if it's some magic incantation that allows them to have their cake and eat it, too. Let me be clear for the slow-witted among us: in the face of a network partition—an eventuality Kubernetes not only anticipates but actively courts—you will sacrifice either availability or consistency. There is no third option. This "synchronous" replication will grind to a halt, your application will hang, and your "business continuity" will be a Slack channel full of panicked developers. They are not delivering consistency; they are delivering a brittle system that makes a pinky-promise of consistency right up until the moment it matters most.

One is forced to conclude that they've never read Stonebraker's seminal work on the fallacies of distributed computing. Or perhaps they did, and simply decided that the network is, in fact, reliable and latency is, in fact, zero. The arrogance is breathtaking. They are so preoccupied with their "Operators" and "CRDs" that they've completely lost sight of the fundamentals.

I shudder to think what has become of basic ACID properties in this chaotic ballet of pods.

• Atomicity? How can you guarantee an atomic transaction across multiple nodes when any one of them could vanish mid-commit?
• Isolation? A solved problem, but one that becomes needlessly complex when you introduce three new layers of networking indirection.
• Durability? The very letter 'D' in ACID is an affront to the Kubernetes model. Durability is writing to persistent storage. Their model is writing to something you hope is persistent before the node it's attached to is de-scheduled into the digital ether.

They have traded the mathematical purity of Codd's relational model for a flimsy, fashionable house of cards. They have forgotten the rigorous proofs and formal logic that underpin database systems, all in service of being able to write kubectl apply -f mysql-cluster.yaml.

Mark my words. This will end in tears. There will be a split-brain scenario. There will be a cascading failure that their precious "Operator" cannot untangle. A junior engineer will apply the wrong manifest file and wipe out a production dataset with a single keystroke. And on that day, they won't be reading the Percona blog for a solution; they'll be frantically searching for a dusty copy of a 1980s textbook, wondering where it all went so horribly wrong. A trifle, I suppose. Progress waits for no one, not even for correctness.