Today we are happy to announce two features on our Cloud Container platform; support for MySQL 8 and a new type of container, Integrated Containers. These changes are closely related to each other and will affect how you work with your Cloud Container so let's dig into the changes and the design decisions we made.
The Challenge
When we launched Cloud Containers in 2016 they came bundled with MySQL 5.6 and phpMyAdmin to manage your databases. It was simple to use and enabled customers to create databases without setting up MySQL. In 2018 we added MySQL 5.7 as a service to every Cloud Container in the same way, which worked well but we also knew this would be the last release we could do this way.
That’s because every container uses valuable server resources, even if it’s idle or unused, so it’s not sustainable or scalable to continue adding services indefinitely. These containers were also hidden, giving you limited visibility into what was running or how many resources your databases were consuming. Implementing MySQL 8 was the time to tackle this challenge.
Our goal was to retain the easy setup and usability of our Cloud Containers, but give you more control over what services you have running while also giving us flexibility to add new services in the future. In short, we wanted to both have the cake and eat it too. Whatever we did it was going to be a significant change that we had to ensure was cohesive with the current infrastructure, and so we got to work.
Introducing: Integrated Containers
This new container type is designed for services that are tightly integrated into our Cloud Container platform with functionality linked directly to our Control Panel, and that are also maintained by us. You can expect them to be plug and play and you choose which ones you want to run on your server. For example you will see your existing MySQL databases are running on Integrated Containers already.
Adding new Integrated Containers works the same way as you would add any other container and you can remove them at any time as well. Let’s say you want to make use of MySQL 8, then you’ll simply add that Integrated Container and you’ll be good to go, with full integration to the Control Panel and the ease of use you expect. If you don’t want MySQL 5.6 or phpMyAdmin you can delete them.