So this MySQL replication thing seems to be sort of medium-okay-availability, not what I would call high availability. Why shouldn't there be a way for clients to fail over automatically? Stick it behind a failover-capable frontend maybe? I need to find out what the state of the art is on this, I guess. For work I'm thinking of enforcing use of a DNS cname to connect to databases, so I could do failover with a DNS change (and closing all connections so clients have to retry). But it should be possible to do better than that with something like a load balancer.