Users

MySQL user accounts within the Cluster can be divided into two different groups:

• application-level users: the unprivileged user accounts,
• system-level users: the accounts needed to automate the cluster deployment and management tasks, such as Percona Server for MySQL Health checks.

As these two groups of user accounts serve different purposes, they are considered separately in the following sections.

Unprivileged users

There are no unprivileged (general purpose) user accounts created by default. If you need general purpose users, please run commands below:

$ kubectl run -it --rm percona-client --image=percona:8.0 --restart=Never -- mysql -hcluster1-mysql -uroot -proot_password
mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON database1.* TO 'user1'@'%' IDENTIFIED BY 'password1';

Note

MySQL password here should not exceed 32 characters due to the replication-specific limit introduced in MySQL 5.7.5 .

Verify that the user was created successfully. If successful, the following command will let you successfully login to MySQL shell via ProxySQL:

$ kubectl run -it --rm percona-client --image=percona:8.0 --restart=Never -- bash -il
percona-client:/$ mysql -h cluster1-mysql-primary -uuser1 -ppassword1
mysql> SELECT * FROM database1.table1 LIMIT 1;

You may also try executing any simple SQL statement to ensure the permissions have been successfully granted.

System Users

To automate the deployment and management of the cluster components, the Operator requires system-level Percona Server for MySQL users.

Credentials for these users are stored as a Kubernetes Secrets object. The Operator requires to be deployed before the Percona Server for MySQL is started.

Note

The Operator will either use existing Secrets, or create a new Secrets object with randomly generated passwords if it didn’t exist. Also, starting from the Operator version 0.5, it will generate random passwords for system users not found in the existing Secrets object.

The name of the required Secrets (cluster1-secrets by default) should be set in the spec.secretsName option of the deploy/cr.yaml configuration file.

The following table shows system users’ names and purposes.

Warning

These users should not be used to run an application.

User Purpose	Username	Password Secret Key	Description
Admin	root	root	Database administrative user, can be used by the application if needed
Orchestrator	orchestrator	orchestrator	Orchestrator administrative user
Backup	xtrabackup	xtrabackup	User to run backups
Cluster Check	clustercheck	clustercheck	User for liveness checks and readiness checks
Monitoring	monitor	monitor	User for internal monitoring purposes and PMM agent
Operator Admin	operator	operator	Database administrative user, should be used only by the Operator
Replication	replication	replication	Administrative user needed for replication
PMM Server API Key		pmmserverkey	API Key used to access PMM Server

YAML Object Format

The default name of the Secrets object for these users is cluster1-secrets and can be set in the CR for your cluster in spec.secretName to something different. When you create the object yourself, it should match the following simple format:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Secret
metadata:
  name: cluster1-secrets
type: Opaque
stringData:
  root: root_password
  xtrabackup: backup_password
  monitor: monitor_password
  pmmserverkey: my_pmm_server_key
  operator: operator_password
  replication: replication_password
  orchestrator: orchestrator_password
  heartbeat: heartbeat_password

As you can see, because we use the stringData type when creating the Secrets object, all values for each key/value pair are stated in plain text format convenient from the user’s point of view. But the resulting Secrets object contains passwords stored as data - i.e., base64-encoded strings. If you want to update any field, you’ll need to encode the value into base64 format. To do this, you can run echo -n "password" | base64 --wrap=0 (or just echo -n "password" | base64 in case of Apple macOS) in your local shell to get valid values. For example, setting the Admin user’s password to new_password in the cluster1-secrets object can be done with the following command:

in Linuxin macOS

$ kubectl patch secret/cluster1-secrets -p '{"data":{"root": '$(echo -n new_password | base64 --wrap=0)'}}'

$ kubectl patch secret/cluster1-secrets -p '{"data":{"root": '$(echo -n new_password | base64)'}}'

Password Rotation Policies and Timing

When there is a change in user secrets, the Operator creates the necessary transaction to change passwords. This rotation happens almost instantly (the delay can be up to a few seconds), and it’s not needed to take any action beyond changing the password.

Warning

Please don’t change secretName option in CR, make changes inside the secrets object itself.

Marking System Users In MySQL

Starting with MySQL 8.0.16, a new feature called Account Categories has been implemented, which allows us to mark our system users as such. See the official documentation on this feature for more details.

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Last update: 2024-04-02