SimplyBlock

Last week I attended Postgres Conference Seattle 2024 as a speaker for two sessions. The first, titled “What’s our Vector, Victor?” discussed the merits of the pg_vectorize extension for Postgres. The second, titled “Kubernetes Killed the High Availability Star” served an advocacy piece for the ultimate deprecation of Postgres High Availability tooling in general. On day two of the event, I ended up having a long conversation about system architecture with Harry Pierson from DBOS.

What is High Availability to Postgres? I’ve staked my career on the answer to that question since I first presented an HA stack to Postgres Open in 2012, and I still don’t feel like there’s an acceptable answer. No matter how the HA techniques have advanced since then, there’s always been a nagging suspicion in my mind that something is missing. But I’m here to say that a bit of research has uncovered an approach that many different Postgres cloud vendors appear to be converging upon.