MercadoLibre Chooses Galera Cluster
to Scale Without Limits in OpenStack

Mercado offers a complete technological and commercial
solution that addresses the distinctive cultural andgeographic challenges of operating an on-‐‑line trading
platform in South America. MercadoLibre was recognized inrecent years as one of the top thirty of the worldʼ’s hottest
brands.
With its success and growth, MercadoLibreʼ’s reliance ontechnology accelerated and its data center was filling
rapidly with physical servers, as well as with data. To
accelerate things, MercadoLibreʼ’s IT staff began to virtualize
much of their data center.
Virtualization saved them time in managing physicalservers, reduced the data center space and electrical powerthat was needed, and enabled them to create more quickly
new servers. By moving to cloud computing, though,MercadoLibreʼ’s IT staff knew there had to be more
efficiencies and an improved end-‐‑user experience to begained. They wanted their internal users to be able to create
their own servers, virtual machines, storage, and networks.
They knew that they could give their users that ability withthe right cloud computing platform. Users would be able
instantly to provision themselves with what they needed,without having to wait for a system administrator to create
an instance.
To achieve those efficiencies and improvements,
MercadoLibre chose OpenStack for several reasons,
including its flexibility and its ability to scale. Scalability isalso what led them to Galera Cluster for its massive increase
in data volumes.

Challenges
Mercadoʼ’s main challenges in terms of their data &database strategy were of a technical nature. The active-‐‑standby schema of MySQL Cluster or DRBD didnʼ’t scale
properly for them. They needed an actual active-‐‑activesolution that would scale simply in procesing power when
adding more nodes without having to deal with failing
failovers. They wanted to scale without limits.
Their private OpenStack Cloud is constantly growing withmore services being added. They needed a solution thatwould scale with the same speed and ease as their cloud tosupport the data growth. They needed to find a solution toreplace their existing database that consisted of MySQL withHeartbeat, as well as DRBD (active – backup) solution
schema.

SolutionQuick Facts
Established in 1999
Retail Industry
About 5,000
employees
1500 Ubuntu Linuxservers
Headquarters in
Buenos Aires,
Argentina

Related Sites
MercadoLibre
OpenStackCodership

About Mercado
MercadoLibre is the largest e-‐‑commerce ecosystem in Latin America.
It provides an on-‐‑line trading platform
in which 58 million consumers use tobuy and sell a variety of consumer
items and much more in SouthAmerica.
Mercado,thecompany
behindMercadoLibre, offers a wide range ofservices to its sellers and buyers
throughout the region, includingmarketplace, payments, advertisingand e-‐‑building solutions. It operates inthirteen
countries
acrossSouthAmerica. Based on unique visitors andpage views, it is a market leader in themajor countries where it operates.

The Mercado staff knew from the outset thatthey would want to implement an open
source solution for their database strategy.
They considered at first PostgreSQL XL, but
eventually opted for Galera Cluster. There
were several reasons for chosing GaleraCluster, one of them being that their database of choicealso needed to be supported by OpenStack. The three mostimportant criteria for their evalutation were scalability,
avoidance of dealing with failing fail-‐‑overs in a no-‐‑go highavailability schema, and guaranteed data persistence,consistency and availability.
They decided finally to implement Galera Cluster for thefollowing reasons:Active replication;
Active – active schema;
Failoverless design;
Cost (no licence fees); andScalability.
The overall solutions is a well thought through combinationof technologies: They used Openstack for cloudorchestration and deployment with about 1,200 physicalservers and more than 10,000 virtual machines. The Galera
clients are mainly the Openstack nodes and theirorchestrator for managing APIʼ’s uses Python andSQLAlchemy to interact with MySQL. The Galera Cluster
consists of 9 nodes (8 actives – 1 NOR) balanced by an F5
bigIP load balancer with more than 80 databases across thecluster and over 700 querys per second per node.
Implementing Galera Cluster took little time, mostly
because itʼ’s very easy to use and to understand. They tested
initially the solution for about three months and then went
into production, as there was some urgency to replace their
existing MySQL solution. Now, if they need to scale they justadd nodes without downtime or any similar challenges
which they faced previously.
The staff took advantage of Codershipʼ’s support, training
and consulting services, which proved very beneficial. This
contributed to significant performance improvements andhelped them significantly throughout the course of theproject.

Results
Now that their new database solution isdeployed, MercadoLibre reports great costsavings, scalability that will lead to further
cost savings and an ease of deployment that wasnʼ’tpossible before. Just as crucially, they now enjoy realavailability.
“No downtime leads to revenue and the best userexperience; and for an e-‐‑commerce site that means
everything.”, their staff noted. Their new solution provides
them with many advantages they didnʼ’t have before:
dynamic scaling with no downtime; 100% availability, allyear long; and active / active query handling.
MercadoLibre expects its business to grow even faster, but
the IT staff no longer will have to spend so much time

About Codership
Codership
Oyprovides
highavailability, no-‐‑data-‐‑loss and scalable
datareplication
andclusteringsolutions for open source databases.
Codership's flagship product is GaleraCluster™
forMySQL,
aTrue
Multimaster
Clusterbasedonsynchronousreplication.
GaleraCluster is an easy-‐‑to-‐‑use, high-‐‑availability solution which provides
high system uptime, no data loss andscalability for future growth. For more
information about Galera Cluster,
please contact info@galeracluster.com

deploying and managing their infrastructure. Theirdevelopers will be able to provision automatically with theresources they need. “Weʼ’re opening two more data centersin the U.S. and our cloud solutions are going to be hosted
there. Naturally, the data is going to be handled by MySQL
Galera clusters.”
They staff at MercadoLibre added that “[they] could not behappier with the product and the support provided by theCodership staff. Itʼ’s just great and we encourage everyone
to try it and use it. Of course, one needs to consider things
such as locking in a shared active-‐‑active schema in theapplication or abstraction layer, but we donʼ’t see that as adownside to the solution, itʼ’s simply the nature of it. We
love Galera Cluster and we invite anyone who is intersted tocheck out our implementation.”

Copyright 2014, Codership Oy. All Rights Reserved.
Galera, Galera Cluster, Galera Replication are trademarks of Codership Oy.
Pohjolankatu 64 A, 00600 Helsinki, Finland
info@galeracluster.com ♣ http://galeracluster.com ♣ +358 50 5179059