The ability to replicate the production environment in an isolated testing environment is a key factor for the success of any infrastructure (major or minor) component upgrade or replacement.
Before introducing a new technology and deploying components into critical infrastructures, the maintainers must have a very deep knowledge of them.
To reach this expertise it is really important to build and re-deploy the testing environment in an easy and fast way.
In Colt Engine we experienced this situation when we decided to migrate all our hosting customers from MySQL 5.1 to MariaDB 10.
During this presentation we will show how we used Docker and docker-compose to replicate our production infrastructure in a testing environment and how we used these technologies to dramatically increase our experience and knowledge around MaxScale. This speech will presents several real examples of different MaxScale use cases ranging from authentication to read-write splitting and about how we automated the provisioning of such configurations with Docker.