MariaDB MaxScale 2.2.2 with Built-in Failover Management Reaches GA!
We’re excited to announce MariaDB MaxScale 2.2, an advanced database proxy for MariaDB, is now GA. It introduces new features for replication cluster failover management, high availability of MaxScale, security features for General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliance, readiness of upcoming MariaDB Server 10.3 while making it easier to manage with REST API and improved management interface – all to make things easier for DBAs.
MariaDB MaxScale provides master/slave deployments with high availability using automatic failover, manual switchover and automatic rejoin. If the master fails, MariaDB MaxScale can automatically promote the most up-to-date slave to master. If the failed master is recovered, MariaDB MaxScale can automatically reconfigure it as a slave to the new master. In addition, administrators can perform a manual switchover to change the master on demand.
MariaDB MaxScale can now be managed via a REST API or MaxCtrl, an improved command line interface (CLI). Further continuing on the high availability theme, HA Cluster consisting of two MaxScales can now be configured using MaxCtrl. When integrated with Keepalived and Virtual IP Address, MaxCtrl enables automatic failover between the two MaxScales of a HA Cluster.
For security compliance such as GDPR, HIPAA and PCI, now the masking filter also allows psuedo-anonymization (obfuscation) and partial masking of query data results returning from MaxScale. Additionally, the database firewall filter can now prevent use of functions for a specific column, so as to not leak column data that are supposed to be masked.
In addition, this release introduces Proxy Protocol. Proxy Protocol, developed for MariaDB MaxScale 2.2 and MariaDB Server 10.3, makes it easier to configure and authorize users by eliminating the need to duplicate them in both MariaDB MaxScale and MariaDB Server. With PAM support in MariaDB MaxScale, a single user can be authenticated from the client, database proxy and database.
For compatibility with the latest MariaDB Server releases, we made sure the query parser in MariaDB MaxScale 2.2 supports all of the new features in MariaDB Server 10.2 (common table expression and window functions) and MariaDB Server 10.3 (PL/SQL).
During the beta period, community members as well as our customers helped us validate this release. Specifically we would like to shout out to Rick Lane, Soumya Das, Matt Mencel, Ketan Kunde and Chandranana Naik for their valuable feedback.
Coming up, stay tuned for several follow up blogs by our engineering team members about the new capabilities of  MariaDB MaxScale 2.2.
More information:
Feel free to post questions in our Knowledge Base or email me at dipti.joshi@mariadb.com.