undefined | Better HN

0 pointsnh28y ago0 comments

On the other hand:

With hosted Postgres, when a failure does happen, isn't it much harder to get at the log files? They seem extremely useful to diagnose the problem and make sure it doesn't happen again, as the article shows. What's your experiene here, can you get at logs easily with hosted Posgres offerings?

And it seems the only way to get reliable Postgres HA for everyone, and to weed out the bugs, is if more people run Posgres HA themselves. For example, I find Stolon and Patroni great, but I would be more relaxed about them if they had 100x more users.

0 comments

1 comments · 1 top-level

rosser8y ago

We aren't using hosted postgres (much, yet). We provision EC2 instances and self-manage it. Failover is scripted, and manually invoked as needed.

None of us trust any of the automated failover solutions enough to use them. We want human judgement in that loop, even if it means being woken at 3AM to push the button. It's that hard to get right.

Just one incident like The Fine Article's is well more than our entire infrastructure's total downtime for the rolling year, and we have hundreds of postgres instances.

Done wrong, automated failover is a net increase in risk. And, in case my thesis is somehow unclear, it's hard to get right.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse