Latest posts from Andrew L'Ecuyer

One of the great new features recently added to Kubernetes - native Sidecar Containers - continues to get closer to GA with each new Kubernetes release. I was reviewing all of the great progress recently made by the Kubernetes Enhancement Proposal (KEP) on Sidecar Containers

As a team you often get handed a piece of software to deploy and manage, for example Red Hat's Ansible Automation Platform (AAP) or Quay. Red Hat's guide is to run and manage this in OpenShift and great, you're already comfortable with OpenShift and have a decent size deployment. Turns out pretty early on you've got a decision to make you didn't even realize was a decision, what are you going to do about the database? Most software needs a database – and the database of choice is overwhelmingly Postgres. But managing stateful systems is a different commitment than stateless apps.

In fact we have the conversation all the time with customers that need Postgres, want Postgres. While some want to manage and be responsible for their database others don't. Well today you've got another choice. You can still have your database integrated with Crunchy Postgres for Kubernetes

We're excited to announce the release of Crunchy Postgres for Kubernetes 5.5. Included in this release are great updates to database administration, monitoring, connection pooling and more. Specific highlights include:

• An updated pgAdmin experience, including the ability to deploy one pgAdmin for use with multiple Postgres clusters
• Easier installation of the metrics and monitoring tools, along with the added ability to monitor standby clusters
• Updates to PgBouncer including support for prepared statements and streamlined connectivity to read replicas

Lukas Fittl recently posted one of his 5 minutes of Postgres videos about his experimentation with different Kubernetes Postgres Operators: Postgres on Kubernetes, choosing the right operator, and handling major version upgrades

Modern day production ready Postgres solutions require quite a bit of sophistication and automation. Changes need to be applied in a uniform and safe way. DevOps and SRE teams need to be in control system updates while limiting disruption to their users.

With the release of PGO v5.1

Recently, there has been a bit of a debate here at Crunchy Data around SQL editors. While some members of the Crunchy Team such as Elizabeth (@e_g_christensen) prefer pgAdmin 4, others such as Craig (@craigkerstiens

Whether upgrading PGO itself, or upgrading the PostgreSQL databases PGO manages, seamless upgrades should be a core feature for any cloud or Kubernetes-based database solution. As a result, one of the goals when we set out to build version five of PGO, the Postgres Operator from Crunchy Data, was to provide a seamless and user-friendly upgrade experience.

Today we’re excited to introduce support for major version PostgreSQL upgrades in PGO v5.1. Using the new PGUpgrade API, you can now seamlessly upgrade your clusters across major versions of PostgreSQL. This means upgrading Postgres is now as easy as submitting a simple custom resource, with PGO handling everything else.

Please join me in walking through an example of this powerful new capability, and see just how easy PGO makes the major version upgrade process!

Create a Cluster

A colleague of mine recently tweeted the following, highlighting the challenges often associated with database upgrades:

Last week had 3 calls before noon of people having difficulty with database upgrades and connection scaling.

Two things that should be staples for a database provider and they had no idea until 6 months in when they tried to upgrade.

As an industry we can build better.

— Craig Kerstiens (@craigkerstiens) March 28, 2022

One of the many powerful features in PGO, the open source Postgres Operator from Crunchy Data, is the ability to use an existing data source to initialize a new Postgres cluster. If you are cloning an existing cluster or migrating volumes, PGO data sources make cluster initialization easy. New in PGO v5.0.5, we've expanded support for data sources even further with the introduction of cloud data sources! We’re excited to offer this new feature to customers onboarding to Crunchy Postgres for Kubernetes

Crunchy Data recently released its latest version of the open source PostgreSQL Operator for Kubernetes, version 4.2. Among the various enhancements included within this release is support for Synchronous Replication within deployed PostgreSQL clusters.

As discussed in our prior post