I'll edit this to provide you a little more context.

I have been using a two-node cluster for a highly-available MariaDB data tier. The configuration of the system is:

• 16 GB RAM
• Xeon with 8 vCPUs

It's a simple, M/S/S replication with a redundant Slave for any immediate data access and failover. So, that's three machines, actually, but yeah...

Some of the features I find are crazy:

• A plethora of storage options - you can use a LOT of storage engines with MariaDB. And all work flawlessly. For a small project, it doesn't matter, but for big, production apps it surely does.
• Kill a query by its ID - You can kill a query by its ID without dropping a connection; this helps mitigate a stuck, or a forever-ending query.
• Clustering improves performance - Unlike with MySQL, you see an instant performance boost when you cluster a couple of machines together.
• Multi source masters - You can have a couple of different masters to replicate from; a use case for this might be JOIN statements and the likes.

And as always, if you need any help with setting it up or with anything, I am always there. :)

My experience goes as far as installing it and not doing much with it.

I do however know that MariaDB was created by the original guys that created MySQL, it's designed to be a drop-in replacement for MySQL (if you're using MySQL 5.5, MariaDB 5.5 should be exactly the same, not sure how the 10 range matches up)

From what I've seen, MariaDB beats MySQL in every benchmark, so at least it has the same or better performance than MySQL.