[fasteo]

I had high hopes in Percona guys with the terrific job they are doing in the MySql space. In our experience, Percona server is working great in production and percona toolkit is a life saver for us.

My very personal takeaway from all these aphyr tests: Distributed systems are hard. Out of the box, very few work properly and probably none of them will work as expected because of a faulty deployment. Think twice before deploying one and consider other ways to scale your system.

In our case, we are going with the memcached approach: client-side sharding with some kind of replication in the backend (mysql master-slave, drdb, etc). Far easier to deploy and, what is more important, far easier to recover when something goes wrong.