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Jetpants: a toolkit for huge MySQL topologies

From a Tumblr engineering blog post:

Tumblr is one of the largest users of MySQL on the web. At present, our data set consists of over 60 billion relational rows, adding up to 21 terabytes of unique relational data. Managing over 200 dedicated database servers can be a bit of a handful, so naturally we engineered some creative solutions to help automate our common processes.

Today, we’re happy to announce the open source release of Jetpants, Tumblr’s in-house toolchain for managing huge MySQL database topologies. Jetpants offers a command suite for easily cloning replicas, rebalancing shards, and performing master promotions. It’s also a full Ruby library for use in developing custom billion-row migration scripts, automating database manipulations, and copying huge files quickly to multiple remote destinations.

Dynamically resizable range-based sharding allows you to scale MySQL horizontally in a robust manner, without any need for a central lookup service or massive pre-allocation of tiny shards. Jetpants supports this range-based model by providing a fast way to split shards that are approaching capacity or I/O limitations. On our hardware, we can split a 750GB, billion-row pool in half in under six hours.

Jetpants can be obtained via GitHub or RubyGems.

Good work Tumblr, excellent move to open up your tools: you’re bound to get good feedback and bug catches/fixes from users in other environments now, making your toolset even better!

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