Introduction

Replication is what allows MariaDB to scale to thousands of servers, millions of users, and petabytes of data. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. Replication on a small scale is a great way to grow the number of users our application can support with minimal effort. As we gain users, we can grow the number of replication servers to match.

There are many different ways to set up how we do replication. In this chapter, we'll only touch on a couple of basic ones: a single master to multiple slaves, and multiple masters to a single slave.

Note

Historically, replication source servers have been called masters and replication target servers have been called slaves. To avoid confusion, we'll be using these names.