Posts about Kubernetes

We are excited to announce the release of Crunchy Postgres for Kubernetes version 5.2. We have been hard at work on a lot of new features we cannot wait to get into your hands. You can get started on version 5.2 from our container portal

Recently I worked with one of my Crunchy Data PostgreSQL clients on implementing caching for pg_tileserv. pg_tileserv is a lightweight microservice to expose spatial data to the web and is a key service across many of our geospatial customer sites. pg_tileserv can generate a fair amount of database server load, depending on the complexity of the map data and number of end users, so putting a proxy cache such as Varnish in front of it is a best practice. Using Paul Ramsey's Production PostGIS Vector Tiles Caching

Getting frequent copies of data for development and testing purposes is a very common use case with our enterprise customer base. We have customers getting data copes for each sprint or development cycle. This increasing data copy problem can put a strain on IT budgets with the storage consumed and the hours spent performing database refreshes.

A common process is to build or refresh environments using database restores. There can be some challenges with this approach. First, the data must be moved from the backup location to newly provisioned storage. Moving large amounts of data around is time consuming and expensive. Another process is to perform storage snapshots of the Postgres data volumes. The risk with this approach is the snapshot could be corrupted or unusable.

Customers using the Crunchy Postgres for Kubernetes

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

Co-authored by Brian Pace

I was excited to hear that Kubernetes 1.22 was recently released with better support for cgroup-v2 and has support for Linux swap

UPDATE TO THIS CONTENT: Since releasing this article, newer versions of Crunchy Postgres for Kubernetes have additional features for streaming replication across clusters. See our post that accompanied the release: Multi-Cloud Strategies with Crunchy Postgres for Kubernetes