Applications that depend on MySQL may need several database members working together so service can continue when one member is lost. Percona XtraDB Cluster supplies that clustered database design, with replication and membership rules that affect how writes and failures are handled. The separate Percona Operator for MySQL automates Kubernetes lifecycle tasks around it. Choosing the cluster means checking application behavior, network capacity and recovery requirements; additional members do not make every write-heavy workload faster.
Current guidance
This entry concerns Percona XtraDB Cluster, the clustered MySQL distribution, rather than a single Percona Server instance. Percona now documents a Kubernetes-native operator for PXC that manages cluster provisioning, scaling, backups and failover. That is a different lifecycle interface from the old stable chart: an operator installation and its database custom resources have separate version requirements.
PXC is appropriate when the application and operating team can accommodate its replication and cluster behavior. Size storage and network capacity for the workload and recovery traffic, spread members across useful failure domains, and evaluate proxy endpoints and connection retry behavior. Replication does not replace independent backups, and adding nodes does not make every write workload scale linearly.
For an existing chart release, record database version, topology, credentials, TLS, proxy configuration and backup format before choosing a supported migration path. Rehearse restoring a copy into the target operator, verify application transactions and recovery after member loss, and retain a rollback boundary before accepting new writes. This advisory has not executed a PXC restore or operator adoption.
Historical upstream link check · 2026-10-09
The recorded upstream address responded successfully (HTTP 200) on 2026-10-09. GitHub confirms that helm/charts is archived: this is a historical chart distribution, not evidence that the application itself is retired. Link availability does not certify the historical installation instructions or current security support.
Website availability is separate from project, chart and image support. Use the current guidance and primary sources on this page to assess the distribution.
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Percona XtraDB Cluster is an open source, cost-effective, robust MySQL clustering solution for businesses. It enables applications requiring synchronous replication of data to have fault-tolerant failover and quick, easy scalability across commodity and off-the-shelf hardware. Organizations use Percona XtraDB Cluster to power highly available applications in the most demanding public, private and hybrid cloud environments. It is an excellent solution for your MySQL cluster and database needs.
This chart, based off of the Percona chart (which in turn is based off the MySQL chart), bootstraps a multi-node Percona XtraDB Cluster deployment on a Kubernetes cluster using the Helm package manager.
The chart exploits the deterministic nature of StatefulSet and KubeDNS to ensure the cluster bootstrap is performed in the correct order.
Prerequisites
- Kubernetes 1.8+ with Beta APIs enabled
- PV provisioner support in the underlying infrastructure
Percona XtraDB Cluster provides the following MySQL cluster advantages:
- Cost-effective HA and scalability for MySQL 5.7
- Higher availability, with less downtime and more revenue-generating uptime
- Improved security, with XtraDB Cluster strict-mode and data at rest encryption
- Greater ease of use with built-in load balancing and traffic management and simplified packagingClusters Dotteds
Percona XtraDB Cluster MySQL features include:
- ProxySQL load balancer
- Multi-master replication
- Synchronous replication
- Data at rest encryption
- Improved SST Security through simplified configuration
- Easy to setup encrypted between-node communication
- Increased read/write scalability
- Zero Data Loss
- ProxySQL-assisted Percona XtraDB Cluster maintenance mode
- Automatic node provisioning
- Percona XtraDB Cluster “strict-mode”
- Percona Monitoring and Management compatibility
How Percona Can Help
Percona Consulting can help you determine if Percona XtraDB Cluster is the right solution for your company and if it is, help with your deployment, while ensuring optimal performance for your database and cluster nodes. Percona Support can ensure your deployment runs as expected and help you in a crisis. If you lack the resources to manage your Percona XtraDB Cluster deployment, our Managed Services team can take over the full operation of your servers.
Benefits:
When you execute a query, it is executed locally on the node. All data is available locally, no need for remote access.
No central management. You can lose any node at any point of time, and the cluster will continue to function without any data loss.
Good solution for scaling a read workload. You can put read queries to any of the nodes.
Drawbacks:
Overhead of provisioning new node. When you add a new node, it has to copy the full data set from one of the existing nodes. If it is 100GB, it copies 100GB.
This can’t be used as an effective write scaling solution. There might be some improvements in write throughput when you run write traffic to 2 nodes versus all traffic to 1 node, but you can’t expect a lot. All writes still have to go on all nodes.
You have several duplicates of the data, for 3 nodes you have 3 duplicates.
Components
Percona XtraDB Cluster is based on Percona Server running with the XtraDB storage engine. It uses the Galera library, which is an implementation of the write set replication (wsrep) API developed by Codership Oy. The default and recommended data transfer method are via Percona XtraBackup.
Sources & further reading
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