In this article, we will look at how Altair works under the hood, the technical decisions Flipkart made to balance availability and consistency, and the engineering trade-offs that come with running relational databases at a massive scale.

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Flipkart built Altair, an internally managed MySQL service that maintains high availability for 150+ million daily users through automated failover and primary-replica architecture. The system uses a three-layered monitoring approach (agent, monitor, orchestrator) to detect failures, prevent false positives, and execute failovers with minimal data loss. Altair prioritizes write availability over strong consistency using asynchronous replication, implements DNS-based service discovery for seamless failovers, and includes multiple safeguards against split-brain scenarios. The design balances operational simplicity with reliability, achieving near five-nines availability while managing thousands of database clusters across Flipkart's microservices infrastructure.

How Flipkart Built a Highly Available MySQL Cluster for 150+ Million Users

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Failure Scenarios and How Altair Handles Them