Monthly health report
System health, the incidents of the month and what caused them, and the optimization opportunities found, written to be read by someone who was not in the room.
MySQL
MySQL estates rarely degrade gently. They run fine until transaction volume, replication lag, or a schema change on a large table makes them stop. Fortified Data runs MySQL environments and does the scaling work, read replicas, partitioning, and replication topology, ahead of that point rather than during it.
MySQL and MariaDB, self-hosted and managed cloud.
What Fortified Data does on MySQL
Fortified Data provides managed services, consulting, and assessments for MySQL and MariaDB, covering monitoring and incident response, query optimization and index tuning, replication and clustering including multi-source and geographically distributed topologies, read replicas, sharding and partitioning, connection pooling, backup and point-in-time recovery, security hardening with encryption and privilege management, version upgrades and migrations, and deployment automation, on self-hosted instances and on Amazon RDS, Google Cloud SQL, and Azure Database for MySQL.
MySQL is the platform most likely to have been set up by the application team rather than by a DBA, and to have run untouched for years afterwards because nothing obliged anyone to look at it. That works until the transaction volume changes, and then everything that was deferred arrives at once.
This page states what Fortified Data does on MySQL rather than what MySQL is. The supported deployments, the scaling work, and the deliverables are below.
The work on a MySQL estate
Six areas, covered continuously under a managed service and individually as project work.
Monitoring and incident response
Continuous monitoring with alerting on performance, security, and system anomalies, and remediation attached to the alert rather than a notification nobody owns.
Query optimization and index tuning
Slow query analysis, index strategy, and server configuration tuning, run as continuous work rather than as a response to a complaint about the application.
Replication, clustering, and failover
Replication topology design and management, including multi-source and geographically distributed arrangements, clustering, and failover configuration that has been tested.
Backup and point-in-time recovery
Backup strategy with point-in-time recovery, verification that jobs completed, and recovery testing that establishes the backups restore rather than that they ran.
Security hardening and patching
Encryption, access control and user privilege management, vulnerability assessment, and regular security patching, applied without costing throughput.
Scaling, migration, and upgrades
Horizontal and vertical scaling strategy, read replica and sharding design, version upgrades, and migrations onto MySQL from legacy or commercial engines.
Deployments, topologies, and scaling
What is supported, and what that support means
MySQL and MariaDB are supported self-hosted and as managed cloud services on Amazon RDS, Google Cloud SQL, and Azure Database for MySQL. The managed variants take over provisioning, backups, and patching. They do not design a replication topology, decide what belongs on a read replica, or notice that a table has grown past the point where an online schema change is safe.
Most MySQL problems presented as performance problems are topology problems. Reads and writes are competing on one instance, a replica is lagging far enough to serve stale data, connection handling is exhausting resources before the queries do, or a table needed partitioning two years ago. Fortified Data treats the topology as a design with a diagram and a rationale rather than as an accumulation of decisions nobody wrote down.
- Self-hosted MySQL, on premises and on cloud infrastructure
- MariaDB environments
- Amazon RDS for MySQL
- Google Cloud SQL for MySQL
- Azure Database for MySQL
- Replication, including multi-source and geographically distributed topologies
- Read replicas for distributed read workloads
- Sharding and partitioning
- Connection pooling and resource management
- Encryption, access control, and privilege management
- Point-in-time recovery
Runs on
On premises
AWS
Google Cloud
Microsoft Azure
What you receive
Evidence, on a cadence, in writing. On MySQL the topology map is the document clients most often discover they never had.
Performance baseline and change list
A measured baseline, then every tuning change recorded with what it altered and what it produced, so an improvement can be proved rather than asserted.
Replication topology map
What replicates to what, in which direction, with what lag tolerance, and what happens to each path during a failover. Written down rather than reconstructed during an incident.
Backup and recovery evidence
Confirmation that backup jobs completed, and point-in-time recovery tests with their results, which is the difference between a backup strategy and a backup schedule.
Capacity and scaling plan
Data growth analysis with the scaling route named: read replicas, partitioning, sharding, or more hardware, each costed rather than described.
Security and privilege review
Accounts, privileges, and encryption settings reviewed against what the application actually needs, which on a long-running MySQL estate is rarely what it has.
Why Fortified Data on MySQL
The scaling work happens early
Read replicas, partitioning, and sharding are cheap to plan and expensive to retrofit under load. They are scoped from growth analysis rather than from an incident review.
Replication treated as architecture
A topology that grew one decision at a time behaves unpredictably during a failover, which is the only time it matters. Fortified Data documents it, tests it, and redesigns it where it cannot hold.
MySQL and MariaDB, one team
The two diverge in ways that matter to replication, storage engines, and upgrade paths, and an estate that runs both gets one team that knows where the differences bite.
Common questions about MySQL services
Which MySQL deployments does Fortified Data support?
Self-hosted MySQL and MariaDB on premises and on cloud infrastructure, and the managed services Amazon RDS for MySQL, Google Cloud SQL for MySQL, and Azure Database for MySQL. Mixed arrangements across self-hosted and managed instances are supported as one environment.
How does Fortified Data scale a MySQL database that has reached its limits?
By establishing which limit has been reached first. Read replicas separate read traffic from write traffic, partitioning and sharding address table and dataset size, connection pooling addresses resource exhaustion that looks like slow queries, and vertical scaling addresses the cases where none of those is the constraint. Fortified Data measures the workload before recommending one, because the four have very different costs and only one of them is usually the answer.
Can Fortified Data fix MySQL replication problems?
Yes. Replication lag, failed or stalled replicas, inconsistent data between primary and replica, and failover behavior that has never been tested are routine Fortified Data work. The engagement normally produces a documented topology alongside the fix, because a replication problem in an undocumented topology recurs in a different place.
Can Fortified Data upgrade our MySQL version safely?
Yes. Version upgrades are planned with compatibility testing in a staging environment and a documented rollback plan before any production change. Where the replication topology allows it, replicas are upgraded and promoted so that the interruption is a planned failover rather than an outage, and the plan states which category the upgrade falls into before it is made.
Can Fortified Data migrate an existing database onto MySQL?
Yes. Migrations onto MySQL from legacy systems and from commercial engines are run as fixed-scope engagements covering schema and data type mapping, application code conversion, row-level validation against the source, and a tested rollback path at every phase. Moves off MySQL onto another platform are run the same way.
What does Fortified Data check in a MySQL security review?
User accounts and privileges against what the application actually requires, encryption in transit and at rest, patch currency against known vulnerabilities, and audit logging. Long-running MySQL estates commonly accumulate accounts with more privilege than the application ever needed, which is the finding that appears most often.
Three ways to work with us
The same MySQL team, engaged three different ways.
Managed service plans
We run your environment, with 24/7 monitoring, maintenance, and proactive improvement.
On-Call DBA
A guaranteed 15-minute emergency response plus monthly on-demand hours that bank when unused.
Database consulting and projects
Project-based engagements for migrations, performance tuning, data modernization, business intelligence, and high availability and disaster recovery.
Start with the MySQL estate you actually have
A health check documents performance, availability, security, and growth headroom across every instance, and produces a prioritized list of what to fix first. On MySQL it usually produces the first accurate picture of the replication topology as well.
Let us show you what's possible.