ABSTRACT OF THE TALK Some of the topics that may or may not be discussed on this live talk could be: - Other than Patroni and the operator, what else was needed to fully switch to Kubernetes? - What is left, what is the future going to bring to the world of Kubernetes and Postgres operators? Expect strong opinions, and facts. Live. Uncensored. Postgres. On. Kubernetes. BIO Álvaro is a passionate database and software developer. He founded and works as the Founder & CEO of OnGres (https://ongres.com). He has been dedicated to PostgreSQL and R&D in databases for two decades. An open source advocate and developer at heart, Álvaro is a well-known member of the PostgreSQL Community, to which he has contributed founding the non-profit Fundación PostgreSQL (https://postgresql.fund) and the Spanish PostgreSQL User Group. You can find him frequently speaking at PostgreSQL, database, cloud, and Java conferences. Every year, Álvaro travels approximately three-four times around the globe—in 2020 (or now more likely 2021 due to COVID-19), he will hit the milestone of having delivered 100 tech talks.

1. Alexander Kukushkin
Álvaro Hernández
DoK Day North America 2021 @ KubeCon
“Postgres on Kubernetes
Applied at Scale in Zalando”

2. 2
ABOUT
Alexander Kukushkin
Database Engineer @ZalandoTech
The Patroni guy
alexander.kukushkin@zalando.de
Twitter: @cyberdemn

3. 3
ABOUT
Alvaro Hernandez
Founder & CEO, OnGres
20+ years Postgres user and DBA
Principal Architect of StackGres, ToroDB
AWS Data Hero
@ahachete

4. 4
Zalando’s Scale
● 136 Kubernetes clusters (~50%/50% prod/test)
● > 2700 PostgreSQL clusters
○ > 1500 staging/testing
○ > 1200 production
● Resources (prod):
○ Data size: > 120 TB
■ Biggest cluster > 12 TB
○ Requests:
■ CPU: > 1200 cores (no quotas)
■ Memory: > 4.4 TB

5. 5
Benefits
● No vendor lock
● Vanilla PostgreSQL
○ Community support
● Real superuser access
● Custom extensions
● Infrastructure-as-a-Code
● Close integration with applications and
the rest of infrastructure
○ IAM, observability

6. 6
On the way to K8s
● IaaC + GitOps is the thing
● Stop being afraid of containers
○ systemd + cgroups
● Applications resilience
○ Failovers are expected

7. 7
Challenges
● Cluster Updates
○ At least once a month
● Cgroups behavior
○ OOM
○ CPU quotas
● Workloads across databases are
different
○ Tuning?
○ Automatic tuning?

8. 8
Challenges
● Infrastructure limits
○ AWS Limits
● Scale of problems
○ Little issue hitting all databases?
● Human behavior
○ YAML
○ Old-school (do everything by
hand)
○ Deleted K8s objects

9. DoK Day North America 2021 @ KubeCon
Thank you!