Managing High Availability in PostgreSQL – Part III: Patroni

In our previous blog posts, we discussed the capabilities and functioning of PostgreSQL Automatic Failover (PAF) by Cluster Labs and Replication Manager (repmgr) by 2ndQuadrant. In the final post of this series, we will review the last solution, Patroni by Zalando, and compare all three at the end so you can determine which high availability framework is best for your PostgreSQL hosting deployment.

• Managing High Availability in PostgreSQL – Part I: PostgreSQL Automatic Failover
• Managing High Availability in PostgreSQL – Part II: Replication Manager
• Managing High Availability in PostgreSQL – Part III: Patroni

Patroni for PostgreSQL

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Typesafe Interview: Scala + Akka is an IaaS for Your Process Architecture

This is an email interview with Viktor Klang, Director of Engineering at Typesafe, on the Scala Futures model & Akka, both topics on which is he is immensely passionate and knowledgeable.

How do you structure your application? That’s the question I explored in the article Beyond Threads And Callbacks. An option I did not talk about, mostly because of my own ignorance, is a powerful stack you may not be all that familiar with: Scala and Akka.

To remedy my oversight is our acting tour guide, Typesafe’s Viktor Klang, long time Scala hacker and Java enterprise systems architect. Viktor was very patient in answering my questions and was enthusiastic about sharing his knowledge. He’s a guy who definitely knows what he is talking about.

I’ve implemented several Actor systems along with the messaging infrastructure, threading, async IO, service orchestration, failover, etc, so I’m innately skeptical about frameworks that remove control from the programmer at the cost of latency.

So at the end of the interview am I ready to drink the koolaid? Not quite, but I’ll have a cup of coffee with the idea. 

I came to think of Scala + Akka as a kind of a IaaS for your process architecture. Toss in Play for the web framework and you have a slick stack, with far more out of the box power than Go, Node, or plaino jaino Java.

The build or buy decision is surprisingly similar to every other infrastructure decision you make. Should you use a cloud or build your own? It’s the same sort of calculation you need to go through when deciding on your process architecture. While at the extremes you lose functionality and flexibility, but since they’ve already thought of most everything you would need to think about, with examples, and support, you gain a tremendous amount too. Traditionally, however, processes architecture has been entirely ad-hoc. That may be changing. 

Now, let’s start the interview with Viktor...

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Starting a website from scratch - what technologies should I use?

Hi, if you were to design your own highly scalable website from scratch, what technologies would you use? Based on Web 2.0 popularity, LAMP seems to be high in the running. But would you tack on CakePHP? Drupal? or build your framework/CMS from scratch? What version of Linux runs best for a scalable website? Would you consider Windows and .NET? Java? Or do you want to throw a brick at me for even suggesting such heresies? Would you prefer Postgres, Tomcat, Perl, Python, or any of that other *NIX fancy stuff...why or why not? Please forget for the moment, "use what you know" argument. I am pretty versatile, and can look for an expert in whatever platform I choose. So all skills being equal, I'm looking for the best community support, the fastest development time and most importantly, the best scaling approach. Let's say, for fun, that I'm planning for the website to have as many messages going back & forth as an eBay. Definitely building this on a budget.. Jason

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