PGCon2019 - 3.4

PGCon 2019
The PostgreSQL Conference

Speakers
Alexander Kukushkin
Schedule
Day Talks - Day 1 - 2019-05-30
Room DMS 1120
Start time 10:00
Duration 00:45
Info
ID 1349
Event type Lecture
Track DBA
Language used for presentation English
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Highway to Hell or Stairway to Cloud?

How we migated our biggest cluster to AWS

At Zalando we run PostgreSQL at scale: a few hundred database clusters in sizes from a few megabytes up to 10 terabytes of data. What is a bigger challenge than running a high-OLTP multi-terabyte PostgreSQL cluster? It is the migration of such a cluster from the bare-metal data center environment to AWS.

There were multiple problems to solve and questions to answer: Which instance type to choose: i3 with ephemeral storage or m4/m5/r4 + EBS volumes? Should we give Amazon Aurora a try? Direct connection from AWS to the data-center is not possible. How to build a replica on AWS and keep it in sync if VPN is not an option. The database (primary and replica) is used by a few hundred employees for ad-hoc queries; ideally, they should retain access through the old connection url. How to do backups of such a huge DB on AWS? We should be able to switch back to the data-center if something goes wrong.

In this talk, I am going to provide a detailed account of how we managed to successfully solve all these problems.