Introduction

Hi!

I am really excited to see some good discussion and involvement from the
Postgres community on the Postgres Docker image. My team is in the
process of
"Dockerizing all the things" at $WORK, and most of "the things" have
Postgres
at their core. Some of our backends are little more than some Python
HTTP/auth glue on top of Postgres. We make heavy use of views, a little
PLPGSQL here and there, and other Postgres niceties such as JSON types.

I have been developing with Postgres for a few years now, but after a
minor
upheaval, I am leading the overhaul of our platform and taking on more
of
an "ops" role. This brings with it DBA responsibilities, so I am quickly
learning about replication, backups, and high availability mechanisms.
Coincident with our containerization effort, we are moving towards a
more
"microservices" platform to alleviate the pain of long-lived, monolithic
applications, lower ramp-up time for devs, and generally make the
development
process simpler. The downside is increased operational complexity of
tying
together all these services across disparate hosts and making them
highly
available. Docker is what we use to isolate services from each other on
hosts
and is a pretty complete tool for this task. To construct our "routing
mesh",
we found some great complements to Docker: HAProxy[1] and Consul[2].
With some
glue provided by Registrator[3] and Consul-HAProxy[4], we were able to
build a
general purpose, zero-conf TCP routing mesh for Docker services with no
new
code. I see this routing layer as essential to Postgres replication and
failover when dealing with arbitrary numbers of containerized clusters.

So I am highly motivated to see Postgres images that are satisfactory
for
production use in a microservices environment *and* are very
approachable to
the casual Postgres user. I began some work on Postgres images for our
use
at $WORK, but Josh pointed me to this list when I asked for feedback.
I've
just finished reading through the the mailing list archives here and
reviewing
the commit history/issues at docker-library/postgres, and I think this
list
is a great place to drive further development of images and guide the
use
of Dockerized Postgres. I want to ask some pretty high-level questions
on
the overall approach since I think that will guide the direction of the
images
we build - tomorrow.

--
Steffen Prince

[1] http://www.haproxy.org/
[2] http://www.consul.io/
[3] https://github.com/progrium/registrator
[4] https://github.com/hashicorp/consul-haproxy