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These threads are always full of people who have always used an AWS/GCP/Azure service, or have never actually run the service themselves. Running HA Postgres i

These threads are always full of people who have always used an AWS/GCP/Azure service, or have never actually run the service themselves. Running HA Postgres is not easy...but at any sort of scale where this stuff matters, nothing is easy. It's not as if AWS has 100% uptime, nor is it super cheap/performant. There are tradeoffs for everyone's use-case but every thread is full of people at one end of the cloud / roll-your-own spectrum.

api 4y ago
I wonder how many people use things like CockroachDB, Yugabyte, or TiDB? They're at least in theory far easier to run in HA configurations at the cost of some additional overhead and in some cases more limited SQL functionality. They seem like a huge step up from the arcane "1980s Unix" nightmare of Postgres clustering but I don't hear about them that much. Are they not used much or are their users just happy and quiet? (These are all "NewSQL" databases.)
- belmont_sup 4y ago
  New user of cockroach. We’ll find out! If this startup ever makes it to any meaningful user sizd
- tluyben2 4y ago
  We are testing all our software on yugabyte now to see how well it works. The cockroach license makes it not a fit for us, so we decided to try Yuga. So far works very well for our workloads.
- KronisLV 4y ago
  > I wonder how many people use things like CockroachDB, Yugabyte, or TiDB? TiDB is a pretty interesting project, but there are a few limitations that should be taken into account when trying to use it: https://docs.pingcap.com/tidb/stable/mysql-compatibility https://docs.pingcap.com/tidb/stable/mysql-compatibility A lot of these are tradeoffs that will affect how a database can be architected, such as having no access to foreign keys and thus needing to think about any sort of consistency and not leaving orphaned data at the application level.
- sgtfrankieboy 4y ago
  We have multiple CockroachDB clusters, have been for 4+ years now. From 2TB to 14TB in used size, the largest does about 3k/req sec. We run them on dedicated hosts or on Hetzner cloud instances. We tested out RDS Postgres, but that would've literally tripled our cost for worse performance. Only had a few hiccups with the big cluster but they were resolved quickly with their support. We're very happy with the product, and have leaned quite a few optimization tricks to get the best out of it. Easy to use as well, join the nodes and it just works. It's not perfect though, we've had quite a few issues with deleting lots of data at once, it doesn't like that. So we have to do deleted in smaller chunks.
ftufek 4y ago
Honestly, that's what I initially thought trying to run ha postgres on k8s, but zalando's postgres operator made things so much easier (maybe even easier than RDS). Very easy to rollout as many postgres clusters with whatever size you want. We've been running our production db on it for the last 6 months or so, no outage yet. Though I guess if you have to have a very custom setup, it might be more difficult.
- qeternity 4y ago
  Yes as I mention in an earlier comment we use Patroni and love it.
- manfre 4y ago
  Have you tested the backup/recovery for any of the DBs yet? I'm curious to hear how that went.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - ants_a 4y ago
    Setup credentials for an S3-compatible bucket and you will have backups + point-in-time-recovery capability. For restores there are a few different options. If you just flat out delete the persistent volumes you will get an automatic restore to latest state in the archive (RPO of ~16MB of transaction log in case of unclean shutdown). Or if you just need to recover some data from a previous state, you can clone a new cluster from backups specifying a timestamp to recover to. Or in case you strictly need to get the same cluster up to a previous state, you can manually exec into the container stick it into maintenance mode and replace the contents with a backup.
- 5Qn8mNbc2FNCiVV 4y ago
  What is the underlying storage used for this? I kind of still struggle wrapping my head around if I should use hostpath and let the operator manage replication or do I actually want a distributed storageclass? I'm always searching but I can't seem to find an answer to this question
988747 4y ago
I've been successfully running Postgres in Kubernetes with the Operator from Crunchy Data. It makes HA setup really easy with a tool called Patroni, which basically takes care of all the hard stuff. Running 1 primary and 2 replicas is really no harder than running single-node Postgres.
- qeternity 4y ago
  Yes as I mention in an earlier comment we use Patroni and love it.

api 4y ago

I wonder how many people use things like CockroachDB, Yugabyte, or TiDB? They're at least in theory far easier to run in HA configurations at the cost of some additional overhead and in some cases more limited SQL functionality. They seem like a huge step up from the arcane "1980s Unix" nightmare of Postgres clustering but I don't hear about them that much. Are they not used much or are their users just happy and quiet? (These are all "NewSQL" databases.)

belmont_sup 4y ago
New user of cockroach. We’ll find out! If this startup ever makes it to any meaningful user sizd
tluyben2 4y ago
We are testing all our software on yugabyte now to see how well it works. The cockroach license makes it not a fit for us, so we decided to try Yuga. So far works very well for our workloads.
KronisLV 4y ago
> I wonder how many people use things like CockroachDB, Yugabyte, or TiDB? TiDB is a pretty interesting project, but there are a few limitations that should be taken into account when trying to use it: https://docs.pingcap.com/tidb/stable/mysql-compatibility https://docs.pingcap.com/tidb/stable/mysql-compatibility A lot of these are tradeoffs that will affect how a database can be architected, such as having no access to foreign keys and thus needing to think about any sort of consistency and not leaving orphaned data at the application level.
sgtfrankieboy 4y ago
We have multiple CockroachDB clusters, have been for 4+ years now. From 2TB to 14TB in used size, the largest does about 3k/req sec. We run them on dedicated hosts or on Hetzner cloud instances. We tested out RDS Postgres, but that would've literally tripled our cost for worse performance. Only had a few hiccups with the big cluster but they were resolved quickly with their support. We're very happy with the product, and have leaned quite a few optimization tricks to get the best out of it. Easy to use as well, join the nodes and it just works. It's not perfect though, we've had quite a few issues with deleting lots of data at once, it doesn't like that. So we have to do deleted in smaller chunks.

ftufek 4y ago

Honestly, that's what I initially thought trying to run ha postgres on k8s, but zalando's postgres operator made things so much easier (maybe even easier than RDS). Very easy to rollout as many postgres clusters with whatever size you want. We've been running our production db on it for the last 6 months or so, no outage yet. Though I guess if you have to have a very custom setup, it might be more difficult.

qeternity 4y ago
Yes as I mention in an earlier comment we use Patroni and love it.
manfre 4y ago
Have you tested the backup/recovery for any of the DBs yet? I'm curious to hear how that went.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- ants_a 4y ago
  Setup credentials for an S3-compatible bucket and you will have backups + point-in-time-recovery capability. For restores there are a few different options. If you just flat out delete the persistent volumes you will get an automatic restore to latest state in the archive (RPO of ~16MB of transaction log in case of unclean shutdown). Or if you just need to recover some data from a previous state, you can clone a new cluster from backups specifying a timestamp to recover to. Or in case you strictly need to get the same cluster up to a previous state, you can manually exec into the container stick it into maintenance mode and replace the contents with a backup.
5Qn8mNbc2FNCiVV 4y ago
What is the underlying storage used for this? I kind of still struggle wrapping my head around if I should use hostpath and let the operator manage replication or do I actually want a distributed storageclass? I'm always searching but I can't seem to find an answer to this question

988747 4y ago

I've been successfully running Postgres in Kubernetes with the Operator from Crunchy Data. It makes HA setup really easy with a tool called Patroni, which basically takes care of all the hard stuff. Running 1 primary and 2 replicas is really no harder than running single-node Postgres.

qeternity 4y ago
Yes as I mention in an earlier comment we use Patroni and love it.