Announcing Google Cloud Support for Crunchy Bridge

Reality is messy, and for every, "We've standardized on cloud Amazon, Azure, or GCP" announcement, there are tens or hundreds of apps hidden within an organization running on the "other" cloud. Most workloads don't span across clouds, but every large organization has workloads on each cloud vendor. And for everyone's favorite database (Postgres) we're excited to say you don't have to compromise quality when it comes to which cloud vendor you're running on. Today we're announcing Crunchy Bridge support for Managed Postgres on Google Cloud. With Crunchy Bridge you can now have the same great PostgreSQL experience on any cloud and seamlessly migrate between cloud vendors as you see fit.

With our support for Google Cloud Platform (GCP) you can provision a production-ready PostgreSQL database in a matter of minutes. Support for Google Cloud Platform brings all the other features and benefits of Crunchy Bridge including:

• Built-in backups and disaster recovery
• Encryption at rest and in transit
• MultiAZ high availability
• Rich set of extensions including PL/Python and PL/R
• Full super user access

If you want to give it a try, create an account and get started today. For those not familiar with Crunchy Bridge, read on to get a sense of what is included.

Rest Easy Because Your Data is Safe

Crunchy Bridge comes with built-in disaster recovery and continuous protection thanks to pgBackRest. This means your data is replicated to redundant storage leveraging base backups and PostgreSQL's write-ahead-log (WAL) every 16 MB or 60 seconds whichever comes first. With your data safe you can rest easy and not have to worry about disk failures.

The underlying mechanism that powers our disaster recovery also enables our point in time recovery feature. Point in time recovery is useful in a few cases. First, it can allow you to have a snapshot of your database as of the exact moment in time. Some of our customers use this for creating a snapshot of production over to staging for fresh data to test against. Second, if you have some disaster happen such as dropping a table, or a customer unintentionally deletes data and you want to recover it. In such a situation you can create a point-in-time-recovery as of the time before your data was deleted then perform extraction on the relevant pieces.

Simple and Straightforward Log Integration

Good log management is a piece of any production application. Crunchy Bridge makes it trivial to send all your Postgres logs to the logging provider of your choice including LogDNA, Loggly, SumoLogic, DataDog. All logs are sent over secure TLS, and then you can easily combine and integrate with all of your other application logs. Configuring logs is as simple as specifying the host, message template, and port.

Built-in PgBouncer

Connection pooling and management is a key tenet of a smooth running database. We recently talked about this in depth about how you can leverage PgBouncer for helping to scale your connections. On Crunchy Bridge this is as easy as enabling the crunchy_pooler extension to activate PgBouncer, then swapping your connection from port 5432 to 5431.

Production Postgres Without Cloud Vendor Lock-in

We alluded earlier that workloads that simultaneously span multiple clouds may not be a reality yet, that doesn't mean cloud migrations aren't. Your workload running on AWS today may be expected to run on GCP tomorrow. And while we can lift and shift our app stack with a small to moderate effort, migrating state is unfortunately a much harder effort. Crunchy Bridge takes care of this for you with our cross-cloud support. Spin up a replica with the click of a button-and failover to it under your control.

Even without migrating, for workloads on different platforms you now have parity in features you use–no more missing Postgres extensions, lack of connection pooling, or downtime due to dump/restore for upgrades.

If you have questions on our GCP support please feel free to reach out @crunchydata or create your account and give it a try today.