Book Image

PostgreSQL 12 High Availability Cookbook - Third Edition

By : Shaun Thomas
Book Image

PostgreSQL 12 High Availability Cookbook - Third Edition

By: Shaun Thomas

Overview of this book

Databases are nothing without the data they store. In the event of an outage or technical catastrophe, immediate recovery is essential. This updated edition ensures that you will learn the important concepts related to node architecture design, as well as techniques such as using repmgr for failover automation. From cluster layout and hardware selection to software stacks and horizontal scalability, this PostgreSQL cookbook will help you build a PostgreSQL cluster that will survive crashes, resist data corruption, and grow smoothly with customer demand. You’ll start by understanding how to plan a PostgreSQL database architecture that is resistant to outages and scalable, as it is the scaffolding on which everything rests. With the bedrock established, you'll cover the topics that PostgreSQL database administrators need to know to manage a highly available cluster. This includes configuration, troubleshooting, monitoring and alerting, backups through proxies, failover automation, and other considerations that are essential for a healthy PostgreSQL cluster. Later, you’ll learn to use multi-master replication to maximize server availability. Later chapters will guide you through managing major version upgrades without downtime. By the end of this book, you’ll have learned how to build an efficient and adaptive PostgreSQL 12 database cluster.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)

Installing and configuring etcd

In order for Patroni to reliably determine or define the identity of the primary PostgreSQL instance, we need a distributed key-value layer. In this recipe, we'll be installing etcd to fulfill that role.

The etcd maintainers appear to have designed it to operate primarily in nameless virtual containers. This means that we just need to download it and place some binaries in appropriate locations. It's not an ideal installation with reliable configuration files and other expected components, but that's easily rectified if we decide to rely on etcd in the long term.

So, let's get started.

Getting ready

The etcd service does seem to be a commonly provided package in many Linux...