Re: Alignment check

On 27.06.24 18:07, Marthin Laubscher wrote:

> I don’t intend dissing or plugging anyone’s efforts or start a flame
> war, but I’d like to get a sense of how the PostgreSQL community feels
> about:
> a) YugabyteDB, and
> b) PostgreSQL on Kubernetes.
>
> For my application I’m deeply vested in Kubernetes as a pathway to being
> cloud-agnostic and I have looked at YugabyteDB because it matches my
> application’s (distributed) architecture more closely.
> But not all the ways to run PostgreSQL on Kubernetes are created equal,
> and YugabyteDB is really far behind on versions and do not support
> extensions in a way that’s useful to me.

Having no experience with it I can't comment on YugabyteDB. With respect
to PostgreSQL on Kubernetes there are various solutions on how to run
it, some of which are quite mature - that is, they have been around for
quite some time, are used heavily and have a healthy maintenance
community (see f.ex. postgres-operator [1]).

One IMHO problematic aspect of running postgres in one or more pods is
that running a postgres cluster is already demanding as is. When a
postgres cluster goes awry then there will be work awaiting you to get
it all backup up and running without messing up user data... using a
solution like postgres-operator puts another additional layer and
wrapper around postgres so if things do not run well there's even more
systems you have to handle. It might or might not help that you have
additional layers doing stuff to the postgres service:

- pro: the additional software layers can contain more operational
knowledge than you have and handle and fix operations better than you
know how to do
- contra: or the additional software layers can hide, obscure, obstruct
the lower layers and interfere with you trying to debug and fix stuff.

Backups and a tested procedure to get things back up and running from
scratch can be useful then.

All that said, from operational experience: postgres by itself is very
robust in taking care of preserving your data, so despite everything
written above, usually you have to be messing up things **really hard**
to make postgres lose data.

*t

[1] https://github.com/zalando/postgres-operator/

PS: Thanks to all of you that are taking care, that postgres is caring
so well about the user's data!