Companies using MariaDB now have the option of an enterprise configuration with MariaDB Server and Galera Cluster software.

The new subscription-based service is designed to make it easier for administrators to deploy MariaDB in a high-availability cluster configuration. For an annual subscription of $20,000, customers get three database nodes, a management interface and a RESTful API. They also get 24/7 support coverage, and all maintenance updates and patches.

MariaDB is an alternative to MySQL, and is being developed at SkySQL. This is a company created by the two main co-creators of the original MySQL, Monty Widenius and David Axmark.

The new service eases the difficulty of configuring database clusters by using the management software to install agents on individual database cluster nodes. These return information to the management software, which then uses templates and data gathered from the network infrastructure to work out the best configuration for the software, and to then install it.

According to Tom Callway's post on the MariaDB blog about the new version:

“MariaDB Enterprise has an API layer as its foundation. The GUI tool which you use to provision, monitor and manage your cluster does all of its work through calls to the RESTful API, including provisioning cluster nodes on bare metal Linux boxes or newly instantiated virtual machines or AMIs. By packaging up the product’s capabilities in this API, we’ve both made it easy to manage Galera Clusters through our GUI, and also provided a powerful tool to simplify the automation of high availability within popular automation and configuration management frameworks.”

SkySQL says the software lets users provision a cluster of separate database servers in minutes, and that once up and running, MariaDB Enterprise helps users manage and monitor their clustered database resources with the dashboard. Galera Cluster is a synchronous, multi-master replication technology.

MariaDB and SkySQL have been gaining ground on MySQL over the last year. Google moved from MySQL to MariaDB in September, as did Wikipedia six months earlier.