[evanelias]

> Adding a replica involves using mysqldump

That's one path, but it is not the only way, and never has been.

MySQL 8.0.17 (released nearly 5 years ago!) added support for physical (binary) copy using the CLONE plugin. And MySQL Shell added logical dump/reload capabilities in 8.0.21, nearly 4 years ago.

Third-party solutions for both physical and logical copy have long been available, e.g. xtrabackup and mydumper, respectively.

And there was always the "shut down the server and copy the files" offline approach in a pinch.

[amluto]

CLONE is indeed nifty. But why is it a plugin? And who don’t any of the major hosted services support it? (Or do they? The ones I checked don’t document any support.)

I wouldn’t call xtrabackup or mydumper an out-of-the-box solution.

[evanelias]

What's wrong with CLONE being a MySQL plugin? I mean a good chunk of this page is people praising Postgres for its plugins.

As for support in hosted cloud providers, that's a question for the cloud providers, no one else can answer this. But my best guess would be because they want you to use their in-house data management offerings, snapshot functionality, etc instead of porting MySQL's solution into the security restrictions of their managed environment.

Yes, xtrabackup and mydumper are third-party tools, as I noted. If you needed something out-of-the-box prior to CLONE, the paid MySQL Enterprise Edition has always included a first-party solution (MySQL Enterprise Backup, often abbreviated as MEB). Meanwhile Community Edition users often gravitated to Percona's xtrabackup instead as a similar FOSS equivalent, despite not being a first-party / out-of-the-box tool.