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.
With my newfound “free time”, I’ve spent a lot of time catching up on my writing. Two PG Phridays in a row, and I have ideas for many more to come. I finally decided to “Open Source” my homelab setup, and since that’s a work-in-progress, it should see many commits in the future. And I finally started earnestly working on the ol’ home lab. Definitely keeping myself busy!
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.
I’ve had something of a “busy” week thus far. My sleep has suffered unfortunately thanks to it, but it’ll settle down eventually. See, when I get an idea in my head, it essentially consumes me. I go to bed yearning to work on it, and if I wake up at night to use the restroom, it’s all I can do to go back to sleep. Sometimes, I simply can’t.
It was that kind of week, when my urge to tinker absolutely devours my faculties.
Well, I’ve finally reformatted my Dell R730 project system and replaced TrueNAS SCALE with Proxmox VE once again. Now that I want to go deeper into virtualizing so I can do more Kubernetes experimentation, using a NAS device as the Hypervisor only serves to complicate the process.
There wasn’t anything critical on the system, so that made it convenient to reformat, and just start from scratch. Why all the re-shuffling? EDB wants me to start digging into our cloud products, and that means I need a more convenient place to stage and experiment with that kind of thing.