Re: Introduction

Hi Steffen,

since I'm working on something very related to your post, thought I would
chime in with my experiences in building a soon to be announced
postgres-docker related product (next week the product is announced).

When I went to build a DNS solution for the postgres docker stuff I'm
doing, I found that consul.io doesn't support PTR records in it's current
release, this is used for doing reverse DNS lookups. Postgres utilizes
reverse DNS lookups when the master postgres receives a client request from
a standby postgres. I have entered a feature request with the consul team
regarding PTR support.

So I had to move off of consul.io (and registrator) and roll my own
DNS-to-Docker solution. This amounted to utilizing named/bind for the DNS
server and writing my own DNS bridge loosely based on registrator, in
particular the docker client API library that registrator used. With a
small amount of code, I now can register the Docker container IP addresses
along with PTR records when a postgres container is instantiated.

regards

Jeff McCormick
jeff(dot)mccormick(at)crunchydatasolutions(dot)com

On Wed, Sep 3, 2014 at 12:29 AM, <sprin(at)fastmail(dot)net> wrote:

> 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
>
>
> --
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> To make changes to your subscription:
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>

--

Jeff McCormick

(843) 327-5754
Crunchy Data Solutions
jeff(dot)mccormick(at)crunchydatasolutions(dot)com