This talk discusses how you can make your web application scalable and failover safe by using MySQL as a complete storage backend.

The first part of the talk covers the typical problems you are faced with as an application developer when you need to get your web application hosted in a failover and clustered environment. The second part of the talk focuses on how you can solve these problems by utilizing the full potential of MySQL as a storage backend for your application.

The talk includes the following topics:

• How you can utilize MySQL database transactions to keep your cluster nodes in sync
• How latency problems might affect your application and how they can be avoided or dealt with
• Solutions for storing binary data like images and media, as well as how they can be served in an efficient manner to handle high traffic
• Solutions for clustering temporary files like cache files
• Session information and personalization
• Which tools you can use for managing your application in a failover environment
• Handling of crashing nodes and maintainance of parts of the cluster while keeping the application up and running at the same time.

The talk focuses on PHP and PHP libraries as examples, but it is also applicable for other programming languages.