PgConf.Russia 2020

A short overview of the main trends in Postgres development - both for the product itself and the community. What has changed in community goals?

Sometimes it maybe a very tricky just to establish a connection with your remote database. Especially if your working place is in highly secured corporate environment and your database server is in highly secured remote cloud.

We will talk about bypassing SSH, SSL, jump servers, proxy servers, VPNs and various SSO (Kerberos/SSPI/LDAP/Active Directory) authentication systems in order to access your PostgreSQL database using console or rich UI interface and JDBC. We will describe different use cases - from trivial and typical to insane and over-secured.

A brief story how MySQL → PG migration could increase company efficiency tenfold times:

1. Program code has been reduced 50 times, with optimization of backend team (from 15 to 3 engineers)
2. Software development of new features has become measuring in days, not in months
3. Infrastructure costs per 1M users have been reduced 20 times
4. Database structure and technical documentation were simplified significantly, from 100K high-dependent tables to just 20 simple tables
5. New security level because of total forbidden on external SQL commands to the database
6. Quick analytics aggregation on multiple parameters, without external analytics systems
7. The last, but not the least: the main business was keeping alive during migration

Patroni and Stolon are two of the most popular and advanced solutions for orchestrating PostgreSQL and ensuring auto-failover for clusters with the Leader-Followers configuration. However, engineers who migrate from good old tools like Corosync&Pacemaker or built-in solutions of other DBMS often run into issues when installing these tools and figuring out the purpose of each component.
In this tutorial, we will go through a typical installation procedure of Patroni and Stolon clusters on virtual machines (not in containers), as well as review their behavior in case of various infrastructure failures. The whole process will be demonstrated on three vagrant virtual machines with pre-built images. You can follow along on your own system if you set up the required environment.