What’s next?¶

Congratulations! You’ve successfully completed the getting started guide. Your MySQL cluster is up and running. Now it’s time to prepare it for production use and learn the essential day-to-day operations.

Immediate next steps¶

These are the most important tasks to tackle right away:

1. Set up automated backups¶

You’ve created a single backup, but production workloads need automated backup schedules to protect your data continuously.

Schedule automatic backups - Configure daily, weekly, or custom backup schedules with retention policies
Restore from a backup - Learn how to restore your data when needed

2. Create application users¶

Your cluster is currently using the root user. For production, you’ll want to create dedicated users for your applications with appropriate permissions.

Create application and system users - Set up unprivileged users for your applications with fine-grained access control

3. Enable high availability¶

Ensure your cluster can survive node failures by distributing pods across different nodes.

Configure anti-affinity and tolerations - Control pod placement to prevent single points of failure

Production preparation¶

Once you’ve covered the basics, prepare your cluster for production workloads:

Security¶

Enable TLS/SSL encryption - Secure connections between your applications and the database
Configure data-at-rest encryption - Protect your data at rest with encryption keys

Configure access to your cluster for external applications¶

Configure HAProxy or MySQL Router - Customize load balancing behavior
Expose your cluster - Configure external access if your applications need it

Performance and reliability¶

Scale your cluster - Add more nodes for better performance or increase resources for existing nodes
Configure MySQL options - Tune MySQL settings for your workload requirements
Fine-tune backups and restores - Optimize backup performance and customize restore operations

Monitoring and observability¶

Monitor with Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) - Set up comprehensive monitoring, alerts, and performance insights beyond the basic setup

Advanced operations¶

As you become more comfortable with the Operator, explore these advanced features:

Add sidecar containers - Extend functionality with custom containers
Multi-namespace deployment - Configure Operator-wide or namespace-specific deployments

Learn more¶

Understand the architecture - Deep dive into how the Operator works and its components
Review all configuration options - Complete reference for Custom Resource settings

Last update: 2025-11-05