Setting up MySQL Cluster in the cloud
Before embarking on a MySQL Cluster installation, it is important to remember that MySQL Cluster is 'just' a storage engine for your existing MySQL database servers. It stores data at the table level, not the whole database, it is therefore on the same functional level as MyISAM or INNODB. You still need a standard MySQL server to access the table data and store the database information. This has the fringe benefit that you can target specific tables to be saved to the cluster, rather than the whole database, if you have some tables that are either more important, or more heavily used.
In this article we are going to cover MySQL Cluster, it's installation on Debian (Lenny), Master-Master replication and how to tie all this together with HAProxy for a very high availability solution.