As noted above, the main advantages of the MariaDB Galera Cluster solution lie in the fact that the technology combines flexible data storage with maximumreliability and availability – you won’t be able to achieve the same results with a standard MariaDB setup.
Thanks to the synchronous replication mechanism you no longer have to concern yourself with making sure that all the individual storage units are up to date. Galera Cluster automatically updates each database unit with the latest changes which completely eliminates the need for making time-consuming manual copies and backups. Furthermore, the multi-master setup means you can access any one of the linked MariaDB database servers when you want to write, edit or delete data, and since you can locate the nodes close to the clients, latency is kept to a minimum.
Another advantage of a MariaDB cluster based on Galera Cluster is that there is good cloud support for this architecture – the setup is ideal for flexible, cloud-based scaling of the database resources. Galera Cluster also makes it easy to distribute data between different data centres because each transaction only needs to be sent to each data centre once.