This is a bit outside my area of expertise. Not sure about the best way to do the automated promotion process, but looking through these docs there's mention of

This is a bit outside my area of expertise. Not sure about the best way to do the automated promotion process, but looking through these docs there's mention of a change to libpq that allows you to specify all the potential hosts and then have it only connect to whichever one is accepting writes (target_session_attrs). http://paquier.xyz/postgresql-2/postgres-10-libpq-read-write/ http://paquier.xyz/postgresql-2/postgres-10-libpq-read-write... Edit to add: I'm also interested to hear the approaches people use here. Today we've been setting up WAL-E to run our db backups so we're in that headspace. I'd actually like to decommission my main db server and provision another one to take its place. Getting the new one up and running from the wal-e archives is easy enough, the switch-over is a little more complex.