Personal blog of Yzmir Ramirez

Patroni is one of the most used high availability (HA) solutions with the PostgreSQL database. It uses a Distributed Configuration Store (DCS) to keep the configuration in a centralized location available for all nodes making it an easy-to-use and reliable HA solution available in the market today.

On the other hand, pgBackRest is a backup solution that helps in taking not only the FULL backup but also incremental and differential backup. This is one of the most used backup tool used for PostgreSQL databases.

In the previous blogs, we have discussed how to set up PostgreSQL HA with Patroni, and how to configure pgBackRest. Both these open source tools have been saviors for DBAs for achieving high availability and performing restoration in ample ways. In this blog, we will integrate both of these tools and understand how they can work together to reduce the server load.

Scenarios:

• Reinitializing the Patroni cluster using pgBackRest (instead of pgBaseBackup).
• Creating the Patroni replica using pgBackRest.

Pre-configured setup:

• Patroni configuration setup for two or more databases.
• pgBackRest configured on a dedicated backup host.

For the purpose of testing these scenarios, the below configurations will be used throughout this blog:

Patroni Nodes:

+ Cluster: prod (7171021941707843784) ----+-----------+
| Member | Host  | Role    | State   | TL | Lag in MB |
+--------+-------+---------+---------+----+-----------+
| node1  | node1 | Leader  | running | 1 |           |
| node2  | node2 | Replica | running | 1 |         0 |
+--------+-------+---------+---------+----+-----------+

Patronictl edit-config shows below:

loop_wait: 10
maximum_lag_on_failover: 1048576
postgresql:
  create_replica_methods:
  - pgbackrest
  - basebackup
  parameters:
    archive_command: pgbackrest --stanza=patroni archive-push %p
    archive_mode: 'on'
    archive_timeout: 120s
    hot_standby: 'on'
    listen_addresses: '*'
    logging_collector: 'on'
    max_replication_slots: 10
    max_wal_senders: 10
    pg_hba:
    - host all all 0.0.0.0/0 md5
    - host replication all 0.0.0.0/0 md5
    - local all  postgres    peer
    wal_level: replica
    wal_log_hints: 'on'
  pgbackrest:
    command: /usr/bin/pgbackrest --stanza=patroni --log-level-file=detail --delta restore
    keep_data: true
    no_params: true
  recovery_conf:
    restore_command: pgbackrest --stanza=patroni archive-get %f %p
  use_pg_rewind: true
  use_slots: true
retry_timeout: 10
ttl: 30

Note: Please check the highlighted sections, which are specific for rebuilding nodes using pgBackRest backup.

Apart from Patroni, we will need a Backup Repo host where pgBackRest has been configured. It can be on a dedicated server or one of the DB hosts. However, it is recommended to use a dedicated server as in case DB goes down, we have a separate server to make the life of the DBAs easier.

Let’s test the scenarios one by one:

Reinitializing the Patroni cluster using pgBackRest (instead of pgBaseBackup)

The main advantage of using pgBackRest instead of pgBaseBackup while reinitializing the node is that it’ll reduce the load from the leader node. This will not make any difference if the DB size is smaller. However, this feature is very useful in case the DB size is huge and it takes hours or days to build the node. This will divert the resource utilization on the dedicated backup host instead of the primary server, which anyways is busy fulfilling the majority of the requests coming to the database.

Let us try to understand how we can rebuild the node using backup.

Many times, we are unable to start the secondary nodes after failover or switchover. To handle this situation, Patroni allows us to reinitialize the database cluster, which will create/rebuild the node by wiping the data directory. In the background, it will copy all the contents of the data directory from the Primary Server and re-create the desired node. 

Please make the changes in the Patroni configuration/yml file and reload the configuration, as shown previously. To reinitialize the Patroni replica node, the reinit command is used as below:

ubuntu@192.168.0.1:~$ patronictl -c /etc/patroni/node1.yml reinit prod
+ Cluster: prod (7171021941707843784) ----+-----------+
| Member | Host  | Role    | State   | TL | Lag in MB |
+--------+-------+---------+---------+----+-----------+
| node1  | node1 | Leader  | running | 1 |           |
| node2  | node2 | Replica | running | 1 |         0 |
+--------+-------+---------+---------+----+-----------+
Which member do you want to reinitialize [node1, node2]? []: node2
Are you sure you want to reinitialize members node2? [y/N]: y
Success: reinitialize for member node2

On the replica node, we can notice in the top command that it is rebuilding the node using pgBackRest backup and not pgBackRest. Ideally, Patroni uses pgBaseBackup in case create_replica_methods is not used which increases the load on the leader node.

 PID USER      PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S  %CPU  %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND
  12939 postgres  20   0  306440 268140      4 S  34.9  27.1   8871:14 GkwP468a
 791850 postgres  20   0  218692  29544  26820 S   8.9   3.0   0:00.28 /usr/lib/postgresql/14/bin/postgres -D /var/lib/postgresql/14/main --config-file=/var/lib/postgresql/14/main/postgresql.conf --listen_ad+
 791881 postgres  20   0   60980  12696  10628 S   3.2   1.3   0:00.10 pgbackrest --config=/etc/pgbackrest/pgbackrest.conf --stanza=patroni archive-get 00000013.history pg_wal/RECOVERYHISTORY
 791874 postgres  20   0  218692   8032   5260 S   2.2   0.8   0:00.07 postgres: prod: startup
 791827 postgres  20   0    7760   3516   3212 R   1.3   0.4   0:00.04 bash
 784973 postgres  20   0   23316    212      0 S   0.3   0.0   0:18.42 tracepath

In case it is using pgBackRest, then it will create a restore file mentioning pgBackRest command as below:

2022-12-15 15:41:29.070 P00   INFO: restore command begin 2.41: --config=/etc/pgbackrest/pgbackrest.conf --delta --exec-id=791815-82f4ea68 --log-level-console=info --log-level-file=detail --pg1-path=/var/lib/postgresql/14/main --process-max=2 --repo1-host=192.168.0.5 --repo1-host-user=postgres --repo1-path=/pgrdbackups --stanza=patroni
2022-12-15 15:41:30.800 P00   INFO: repo1: restore backup set 20221213-154604F, recovery will start at 2022-12-13 15:46:04
2022-12-15 15:41:30.877 P00 DETAIL: check '/var/lib/postgresql/14/main' exists
2022-12-15 15:41:30.877 P00 DETAIL: remove 'global/pg_control' so cluster will not start if restore does not complete
2022-12-15 15:41:30.918 P00   INFO: remove invalid files/links/paths from '/var/lib/postgresql/14/main'
2022-12-15 15:41:30.919 P00 DETAIL: remove invalid file '/var/lib/postgresql/14/main/backup_label.old'
2022-12-15 15:41:31.841 P00 DETAIL: remove invalid file '/var/lib/postgresql/14/main/base/13761/pg_internal.init'
2022-12-15 15:41:31.920 P00 DETAIL: remove invalid file '/var/lib/postgresql/14/main/global/pg_internal.init'

 

Creating the Patroni replica using pgBackRest:

In case the bootstrap section contains code to rebuild the node using pgBackRest, then while adding the node in the already existing Patroni cluster, the first time building of the new node will use pgBackRest backup instead of pgBaseBackup. Also, point-in-time recovery can be done using the bootstrap section. This will help in not only reducing the load from the leader node but also the backup node will help restore the data with comparatively lesser resource utilization.

To configure the same, please use the below in the Patroni configuration file:

bootstrap:
    method: <custom_bootstrap_method_name>
    <custom_bootstrap_method_name>:
        command: <path_to_custom_bootstrap_script> [param1 [, ...]]
        keep_existing_recovery_conf: True/False
        no_params: True/False
        recovery_conf:
            recovery_target_action: promote
            recovery_target_timeline: <PITR_Time>
            restore_command: <method_specific_restore_command>

In this example, the below section has been added to Patroni config, which will build the node by performing point-in-time recovery using the time stamp mentioned.

bootstrap:
  method: pitr_restore_by_pgbackrest
  pitr_restore_by_pgbackrest:
    command: 'pgbackrest --config=/etc/pgbackrest/pgbackrest.conf --stanza=patroni --log-level-file=detail --link-all --type=time
 --target="2022-12-13 15:46:04" restore'
    keep_existing_recovery_conf: True
    no_params: True
    recovery_conf:
      recovery_target_action: "promote"
      recovery_target_time: "2022-12-13 15:46:04"
      restore_command: 'pgbackrest -config=/etc/rdba/pgbackrest/pgbackrest.conf --stanza=patroni --log-level-file=detail archive-get %f "%p"'
      recovery_target_inclusive: true

When the node is being built, one can see in the TOP processes that pgBackRest is being used instead of base backup and Patroni Status when the node is being built:

? patroni.service - PostgreSQL high-availability manager
     Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/patroni.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
    Drop-In: /etc/systemd/system/patroni.service.d
             ??override.conf
     Active: active (running) since Mon 2022-12-19 19:06:16 UTC; 3s ago
   Main PID: 2094 (patroni)
      Tasks: 11 (limit: 1143)
     Memory: 114.6M
        CPU: 941ms
     CGroup: /system.slice/patroni.service
             ??2094 /usr/bin/python3 /usr/bin/patroni /etc/patroni/db2.yml
             ??2100 /usr/bin/pgbackrest --config=/etc/pgbackrest/pgbackrest.conf --stanza=patroni --log-level-file=detail --delta restore
             ??2102 /usr/bin/pgbackrest --config=/etc/pgbackrest/pgbackrest.conf --exec-id=2100-9618fafd --log-level-console=off --log-level-file=off --log-level-stderr=error --process=1 --remote-type=repo --stanza=p>
             ??2103 /usr/bin/pgbackrest --config=/etc/pgbackrest/pgbackrest.conf --exec-id=2100-9618fafd --log-level-console=off --log-level-file=off --log-level-stderr=error --process=2 --remote-type=repo --stanza=p>
             ??2104 ssh -o LogLevel=error -o Compression=no -o PasswordAuthentication=no postgres@192.168.0.3 "/usr/bin/pgbackrest --exec-id=2100-9618fafd --log-level-console=off --log-level-file=off --log-level-st>
             ??2105 ssh -o LogLevel=error -o Compression=no -o PasswordAuthentication=no postgres@192.168.0.3 "/usr/bin/pgbackrest --exec-id=2100-9618fafd --log-level-console=off --log-level-file=off --log-level-st>
Dec 19 19:06:16 ip-192-168-0-2 systemd[1]: Started PostgreSQL high-availability manager.
Dec 19 19:06:16 ip-192-168-0-2 patroni[2094]: 2022-12-19 19:06:16,415 INFO: Selected new etcd server http://192.168.0.1:2379
Dec 19 19:06:16 ip-192-168-0-2 patroni[2094]: 2022-12-19 19:06:16,434 INFO: No PostgreSQL configuration items changed, nothing to reload.
Dec 19 19:06:16 ip-192-168-0-2 patroni[2094]: 2022-12-19 19:06:16,551 INFO: Lock owner: node3; I am db2
Dec 19 19:06:16 ip-192-168-0-2 patroni[2094]: 2022-12-19 19:06:16,633 INFO: trying to bootstrap from leader 'node3'
Dec 19 19:06:16 ip-192-168-0-2 patroni[2100]: 2022-12-19 19:06:16.645 P00   INFO: restore command begin 2.41: --config=/etc/pgbackrest/pgbackrest.conf --delta --exec-id=2100-9618fafd --log-level-console=info --log-l>
Dec 19 19:06:16 ip-192-168-0-2 patroni[2100]: WARN: --delta or --force specified but unable to find 'PG_VERSION' or 'backup.manifest' in '/var/lib/postgresql/14/main' to confirm that this is a valid $PGDATA director
Dec 19 19:06:17 ip-192-168-0-2 patroni[2100]: 2022-12-19 19:06:17.361 P00   INFO: repo1: restore backup set 20221213-154604F, recovery will start at 2022-12-13 15:46:04

Notice that it is using delta restore which means it will automatically identify which files are required to restore and only those will be restored making the whole process faster.

Also, the log file (by default – /var/log/pgbackrest) will contain the restore date and time as below:

-------------------PROCESS START-------------------
2022-12-19 19:06:16.645 P00   INFO: restore command begin 2.41: --config=/etc/pgbackrest/pgbackrest.conf --delta --exec-id=2100-9618fafd --log-level
-console=info --log-level-file=detail --pg1-path=/var/lib/postgresql/14/main --process-max=2 --repo1-host=192.168.0.3 --repo1-host-user=postgres -
-repo1-path=/pgrdbackups --stanza=patroni
2022-12-19 19:06:16.646 P00   WARN: --delta or --force specified but unable to find 'PG_VERSION' or 'backup.manifest' in '/var/lib/postgresql/14/mai
n' to confirm that this is a valid $PGDATA directory.  --delta and --force have been disabled and if any files exist in the destination directories
the restore will be aborted.
2022-12-19 19:06:17.361 P00   INFO: repo1: restore backup set 20221213-154604F, recovery will start at 2022-12-13 15:46:04
2022-12-19 19:06:17.361 P00 DETAIL: check '/var/lib/postgresql/14/main' exists
2022-12-19 19:06:17.362 P00 DETAIL: create path '/var/lib/postgresql/14/main/base'
2022-12-19 19:06:17.362 P00 DETAIL: create path '/var/lib/postgresql/14/main/base/1'
2022-12-19 19:06:17.362 P00 DETAIL: create path '/var/lib/postgresql/14/main/base/13760'
2022-12-19 19:06:17.362 P00 DETAIL: create path '/var/lib/postgresql/14/main/base/13761'

This blog majorly focuses on integrating the pgBackRest and Patroni, however, one can use other backup tools like WAL_E or BARMAN to rebuild the nodes. More information on such configuration can be found in the Patroni documentation.

Conclusion

Patroni and pgBackRest solutions work best when integrated, which helps in reducing the load from the Primary DB Server. This integration, where the node is reinitialized using pgBackRest, makes the optimum utilization of the dedicated backup server. If the Patroni setup is already configured and the dedicated backup host is also available, then making a few configuration changes in patroni.yml can work like wonders.

A couple of weeks ago, Jobin and I did a short presentation during Percona Live Online bearing a similar title as the one for this post: “PostgreSQL HA With Patroni: Looking at Failure Scenarios and How the Cluster Recovers From Them”. We deployed a 3-node PostgreSQL environment with some recycled hardware we had lying around and set ourselves at “breaking” it in different ways: by unplugging network and power cables, killing main processes, attempting to saturate processors. All of this while continuously writing and reading data from PostgreSQL. The idea was to see how Patroni would handle the failures and manage the cluster to continue delivering service. It was a fun demo!

We promised a follow-up post explaining how we set up the environment, so you could give it a try yourselves, and this is it. We hope you also have fun attempting to reproduce our small experiment, but mostly that you use it as an opportunity to learn how a PostgreSQL HA environment managed by Patroni works in practice: there is nothing like a hands-on lab for this!

Initial Setup

We recycled three 10-year old Intel Atom mini-computers for our experiment but you could use some virtual machines instead: even though you will miss the excitement of unplugging real cables, this can still be simulated with a VM. We installed the server version of Ubuntu 20.04 and configured them to know “each other” by hostname; here’s how the hosts file of the first node looked like:

$ cat /etc/hosts
127.0.0.1 localhost node1
192.168.1.11 node1
192.168.1.12 node2
192.168.1.13 node3

etcd

Patroni supports a myriad of systems for Distribution Configuration Store but etcd remains a popular choice. We installed the version available from the Ubuntu repository on all three nodes:

sudo apt-get install etcd

It is necessary to initialize the etcd cluster from one of the nodes and we did that from node1 using the following configuration file:

$ cat /etc/default/etcd
ETCD_NAME=node1
ETCD_INITIAL_CLUSTER="node1=http://192.168.1.11:2380"
ETCD_INITIAL_CLUSTER_TOKEN="devops_token"
ETCD_INITIAL_CLUSTER_STATE="new"
ETCD_INITIAL_ADVERTISE_PEER_URLS="http://192.168.1.11:2380"
ETCD_DATA_DIR="/var/lib/etcd/postgresql"
ETCD_LISTEN_PEER_URLS="http://192.168.1.11:2380"
ETCD_LISTEN_CLIENT_URLS="http://192.168.1.11:2379,http://localhost:2379"
ETCD_ADVERTISE_CLIENT_URLS="http://192.168.1.11:2379"

Note how ETCD_INITIAL_CLUSTER_STATE is defined with “new”.

We then restarted the service:

sudo systemctl restart etcd

We can then move on to install etcd on node2. The configuration file follows the same structure as that of node1, except that we are adding node2 to an existing cluster so we should indicate the other node(s):

ETCD_NAME=node2
ETCD_INITIAL_CLUSTER="node1=http://192.168.1.11:2380,node2=http://192.168.1.12:2380"
ETCD_INITIAL_CLUSTER_TOKEN="devops_token"
ETCD_INITIAL_CLUSTER_STATE="existing"
ETCD_INITIAL_ADVERTISE_PEER_URLS="http://192.168.1.12:2380"
ETCD_DATA_DIR="/var/lib/etcd/postgresql"
ETCD_LISTEN_PEER_URLS="http://192.168.1.12:2380"
ETCD_LISTEN_CLIENT_URLS="http://192.168.1.12:2379,http://localhost:2379"
ETCD_ADVERTISE_CLIENT_URLS="http://192.168.1.12:2379"

Before we restart the service, we need to formally add node2 to the etcd cluster by running the following command on node1:

sudo etcdctl member add node2 http://192.168.1.12:2380

We can then restart the etcd service on node2:

sudo systemctl restart etcd

The configuration file for node3 looks like this:

ETCD_NAME=node3
ETCD_INITIAL_CLUSTER="node1=http://192.168.1.11:2380,node2=http://192.168.1.12:2380,node3=http://192.168.1.13:2380"
ETCD_INITIAL_CLUSTER_TOKEN="devops_token"
ETCD_INITIAL_CLUSTER_STATE="existing"
ETCD_INITIAL_ADVERTISE_PEER_URLS="http://192.168.1.13:2380"
ETCD_DATA_DIR="/var/lib/etcd/postgresql"
ETCD_LISTEN_PEER_URLS="http://192.168.1.13:2380"
ETCD_LISTEN_CLIENT_URLS="http://192.168.1.13:2379,http://localhost:2379"
ETCD_ADVERTISE_CLIENT_URLS="http://192.168.1.13:2379"

Remember we need to add node3 to the cluster by running the following command on node1:

sudo etcdctl member add node3 http://192.168.1.13:2380

before we can restart the service on node3:

sudo systemctl restart etcd

We can verify the cluster state to confirm it has been deployed successfully by running the following command from any of the nodes:

$ sudo etcdctl member list
2ed43136d81039b4: name=node3 peerURLs=http://192.168.1.13:2380 clientURLs=http://192.168.1.13:2379 isLeader=false
d571a1ada5a5afcf: name=node1 peerURLs=http://192.168.1.11:2380 clientURLs=http://192.168.1.11:2379 isLeader=true
ecec6c549ebb23bc: name=node2 peerURLs=http://192.168.1.12:2380 clientURLs=http://192.168.1.12:2379 isLeader=false

As we can see above, node1 is the leader at this point, which is expected since the etcd cluster has been bootstrapped from it. If you get a different result, check for etcd entries logged to /var/log/syslog on each node.

Watchdog

Quoting Patroni’s manual:

Watchdog devices are software or hardware mechanisms that will reset the whole system when they do not get a keepalive heartbeat within a specified timeframe. This adds an additional layer of fail safe in case usual Patroni split-brain protection mechanisms fail.

While the use of a watchdog mechanism with Patroni is optional, you shouldn’t really consider deploying a PostgreSQL HA environment in production without it.

For our tests, we used the standard software implementation for watchdog that is shipped with Ubuntu 20.04, a module called softdog. Here’s the procedure we used in all three nodes to configure the module to load:

sudo sh -c 'echo "softdog" >> /etc/modules'

Patroni will be the component interacting with the watchdog device. Since Patroni is run by the postgres user, we need to either set the permissions of the watchdog device open enough so the postgres user can write to it or make the device owned by postgres itself, which we consider a safer approach (as it is more restrictive):

sudo sh -c 'echo "KERNEL==\"watchdog\", OWNER=\"postgres\", GROUP=\"postgres\"" >> /etc/udev/rules.d/61-watchdog.rules'

These two steps looked like all that would be required for watchdog to work but to our surprise, the softdog module wasn’t loaded after restarting the servers. After spending quite some time digging around we figured the module was blacklisted by default and there was a strain file with such a directive still lingering around:

$ grep blacklist /lib/modprobe.d/* /etc/modprobe.d/* |grep softdog
/lib/modprobe.d/blacklist_linux_5.4.0-72-generic.conf:blacklist softdog

Editing that file in each of the nodes to remove the line above and restarting the servers did the trick:

$ lsmod | grep softdog
softdog                16384  0

$ ls -l /dev/watchdog*
crw-rw---- 1 postgres postgres  10, 130 May 21 21:30 /dev/watchdog
crw------- 1 root     root     245,   0 May 21 21:30 /dev/watchdog0

PostgreSQL

Percona Distribution for PostgreSQL can be easily installed from the Percona Repository in a few easy steps:

sudo apt-get update -y; sudo apt-get install -y wget gnupg2 lsb-release curl
wget https://repo.percona.com/apt/percona-release_latest.generic_all.deb
sudo dpkg -i percona-release_latest.generic_all.deb
sudo apt-get update
sudo percona-release setup ppg-12
sudo apt-get install percona-postgresql-12

An important concept to understand in a PostgreSQL HA environment like this one is that PostgreSQL should not be started automatically by systemd during the server initialization: we should leave it to Patroni to fully manage it, including the process of starting and stopping the server. Thus, we should disable the service:

sudo systemctl disable postgresql

For our tests, we want to start with a fresh new PostgreSQL setup and let Patroni bootstrap the cluster, so we stop the server and remove the data directory that has been created as part of the PostgreSQL installation:

sudo systemctl stop postgresql
sudo rm -fr /var/lib/postgresql/12/main

These steps should be repeated in nodes 2 and 3 as well.

Patroni

The Percona Repository also includes a package for Patroni so with it already configured in the nodes we can install Patroni with a simple:

sudo apt-get install percona-patroni

Here’s the configuration file we have used for node1:

$ cat /etc/patroni/config.yml
scope: stampede
name: node1

restapi:
  listen: 0.0.0.0:8008
  connect_address: node1:8008

etcd:
  host: node1:2379

bootstrap:
  # this section will be written into Etcd:/<namespace>/<scope>/config after initializing new cluster
  dcs:
    ttl: 30
    loop_wait: 10
    retry_timeout: 10
    maximum_lag_on_failover: 1048576
#    master_start_timeout: 300
#    synchronous_mode: false
    postgresql:
      use_pg_rewind: true
      use_slots: true
      parameters:
        wal_level: replica
        hot_standby: "on"
        logging_collector: 'on'
        max_wal_senders: 5
        max_replication_slots: 5
        wal_log_hints: "on"
        #archive_mode: "on"
        #archive_timeout: 600
        #archive_command: "cp -f %p /home/postgres/archived/%f"
        #recovery_conf:
        #restore_command: cp /home/postgres/archived/%f %p

  # some desired options for 'initdb'
  initdb:  # Note: It needs to be a list (some options need values, others are switches)
  - encoding: UTF8
  - data-checksums

  pg_hba:  # Add following lines to pg_hba.conf after running 'initdb'
  - host replication replicator 192.168.1.1/24 md5
  - host replication replicator 127.0.0.1/32 trust
  - host all all 192.168.1.1/24 md5
  - host all all 0.0.0.0/0 md5
#  - hostssl all all 0.0.0.0/0 md5

  # Additional script to be launched after initial cluster creation (will be passed the connection URL as parameter)
# post_init: /usr/local/bin/setup_cluster.sh
  # Some additional users users which needs to be created after initializing new cluster
  users:
    admin:
      password: admin
      options:
        - createrole
        - createdb

postgresql:
  listen: 0.0.0.0:5432
  connect_address: node1:5432
  data_dir: "/var/lib/postgresql/12/main"
  bin_dir: "/usr/lib/postgresql/12/bin"
#  config_dir:
  pgpass: /tmp/pgpass0
  authentication:
    replication:
      username: replicator
      password: vagrant
    superuser:
      username: postgres
      password: vagrant
  parameters:
    unix_socket_directories: '/var/run/postgresql'

watchdog:
  mode: required # Allowed values: off, automatic, required
  device: /dev/watchdog
  safety_margin: 5

tags:
    nofailover: false
    noloadbalance: false
    clonefrom: false
    nosync: false

With the configuration file in place, and now that we already have the etcd cluster up, all that is required is to restart the Patroni service:

sudo systemctl restart patroni

When Patroni starts, it will take care of initializing PostgreSQL (because the service is not currently running and the data directory is empty) following the directives in the bootstrap section of Patroni’s configuration file. If everything went according to the plan, you should be able to connect to PostgreSQL using the credentials in the configuration file (password is vagrant):

$ psql -U postgres
psql (12.6 (Ubuntu 2:12.6-2.focal))
Type "help" for help.

postgres=#

Repeat the operation for installing Patroni on nodes 2 and 3: the only difference is that you will need to replace the references to node1 in the configuration file (there are four of them, shown in bold) with the respective node name.

You can also check the state of the Patroni cluster we just created with:

$ sudo patronictl -c /etc/patroni/config.yml list
+----------+--------+-------+--------+---------+----+-----------+
| Cluster  | Member |  Host |  Role  |  State  | TL | Lag in MB |
+----------+--------+-------+--------+---------+----+-----------+
| stampede | node1  | node1 | Leader | running |  2 |           |
| stampede | node2  | node2 |        | running |  2 |         0 |
| stampede | node3  | node3 |        | running |  2 |         0 |
+----------+--------+-------+--------+---------+----+-----------+

node1 started the Patroni cluster so it was automatically made the leader – and thus the primary/master PostgreSQL server. Nodes 2 and 3 are configured as read replicas (as the hot_standby option was enabled in Patroni’s configuration file).

HAProxy

A common implementation of high availability in a PostgreSQL environment makes use of a proxy: instead of connecting directly to the database server, the application will be connecting to the proxy instead, which will forward the request to PostgreSQL. When HAproxy is used for this, it is also possible to route read requests to one or more replicas, for load balancing. However, this is not a transparent process: the application needs to be aware of this and split read-only from read-write traffic itself. With HAproxy, this is done by providing two different ports for the application to connect. We opted for the following setup:

• Writes   ?  5000
• Reads   ?  5001

HAproxy can be installed as an independent server (and you can have as many as you want) but it can also be installed on the application server or the database server itself – it is a light enough service. For our tests, we planned on using our own Linux workstations (which also run Ubuntu 20.04) to simulate application traffic so we installed HAproxy on them:

sudo apt-get install haproxy

With the software installed, we modified the main configuration file as follows:

$ cat /etc/haproxy/haproxy.cfg
global
    maxconn 100

defaults
    log    global
    mode    tcp
    retries 2
    timeout client 30m
    timeout connect 4s
    timeout server 30m
    timeout check 5s

listen stats
    mode http
    bind *:7000
    stats enable
    stats uri /

listen primary
    bind *:5000
    option httpchk OPTIONS /master
    http-check expect status 200
    default-server inter 3s fall 3 rise 2 on-marked-down shutdown-sessions
    server node1 node1:5432 maxconn 100 check port 8008
    server node2 node2:5432 maxconn 100 check port 8008
    server node3 node3:5432 maxconn 100 check port 8008

listen standbys
    balance roundrobin
    bind *:5001
    option httpchk OPTIONS /replica
    http-check expect status 200
    default-server inter 3s fall 3 rise 2 on-marked-down shutdown-sessions
    server node1 node1:5432 maxconn 100 check port 8008
    server node2 node2:5432 maxconn 100 check port 8008
    server node3 node3:5432 maxconn 100 check port 8008

Note there are two sections: primary, using port 5000, and standbys, using port 5001. All three nodes are included in both sections: that’s because they are all potential candidates to be either primary or secondary. For HAproxy to know which role each node currently has, it will send an HTTP request to port 8008 of the node: Patroni will answer. Patroni provides a built-in REST API support for health check monitoring that integrates perfectly with HAproxy for this:

$ curl -s http://node1:8008
{"state": "running", "postmaster_start_time": "2021-05-24 14:50:11.707 UTC", "role": "master", "server_version": 120006, "cluster_unlocked": false, "xlog": {"location": 25615248}, "timeline": 1, "database_system_identifier": "6965869170583425899", "patroni": {"version": "1.6.4", "scope": "stampede"}}

We configured the standbys group to balance read-requests in a round-robin fashion, so each connection request (or reconnection) will alternate between the available replicas. We can test this in practice, let’s save the postgres user password in a file to facilitate the process:

echo "localhost:5000:postgres:postgres:vagrant" > ~/.pgpass
echo "localhost:5001:postgres:postgres:vagrant" >> ~/.pgpass
chmod 0600 ~/.pgpass

We can then execute two read-requests to verify the round-robin mechanism is working as intended:

$ psql -Upostgres -hlocalhost -p5001 -t -c "select inet_server_addr()"
 192.168.1.13

$ psql -Upostgres -hlocalhost -p5001 -t -c "select inet_server_addr()"
 192.168.1.12

as well as test the writer access:

$ psql -Upostgres -hlocalhost -p5000 -t -c "select inet_server_addr()"
 192.168.1.11

You can also check the state of HAproxy by visiting http://localhost:7000/ on your browser.

Workload

To best simulate a production environment to test our failure scenarios, we wanted to have continuous reads and writes to the database. We could have used a benchmark tool such as Sysbench or Pgbench but we were more interested in observing the switch of source server upon a server failure than load itself. Jobin wrote a simple Python script that is perfect for this, HAtester. As was the case with HAproxy, we run the script from our Linux workstation. Since it is a Python script, you need to have a PostgreSQL driver for Python installed to execute it:

sudo apt-get install python3-psycopg2
curl -LO https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jobinau/pgscripts/main/patroni/HAtester.py
chmod +x HAtester.py

Edit the script with the credentials to access the PostgreSQL servers (through HAproxy) if you are using different settings from ours. The only requirement for it to work is to have the target table created beforehand, so first connect to the postgres database (unless you are using a different target) in the Primary and run:

CREATE TABLE HATEST (TM TIMESTAMP);

You can then start two different sessions:

1. One for writes:
   

   ./HAtester.py 5000

2. One for reads:

   ./HAtester.py 5001

The idea is to observe what happens with database traffic when the environment experiences a failure; that is, how HAproxy will route reads and writes as Patroni adjusts the PostgreSQL cluster. You can continuously monitor Patroni from the point of view of the nodes by opening a session in each of them and running the following command:

sudo -u postgres watch patronictl -c /etc/patroni/config.yml list

To facilitate observability and better follow the changes in real-time, we used the terminal multiplexer Tmux to visualize all 5 sessions on the same screen:

• On the left side, we have one session open for each of the 3 nodes, continuously running:
  

  sudo -u postgres watch patronictl -c /etc/patroni/config.yml list

  It’s better to have the Patroni view for each node independently because when you start the failure tests you will lose connection to a part of the cluster.

• On the right side, we are executing the HAtester.py script from our workstation:
  • Sending writes through port 5000:
    

    ./HAtester.py 5000

  • and reads through port 5001:
    

    ./HAtester.py 5001

A couple of notes on the execution of the HAtester.py script:

• Pressing Ctrl+C will break the connection but the script will reconnect, this time to a different replica (in the case of reads) due to having the Standbys group on HAproxy configured with round-robin balancing.
• When a switchover or failover takes place and the nodes are re-arranged in the cluster, you may temporarily see writes sent to a node that used to be a replica and was just promoted as primary and reads send to a node that used to be the primary and was demoted as secondary: that’s a limitation of the HAtester.py script but “by design”; we favored faster reconnections and minimal checks on the node’s role for demonstration purposes. On a production application, this part ought to be implemented differently.

Testing Failure Scenarios

The fun part starts now! We leave it to you to test and play around to see what happens with the PostgreSQL cluster in practice following a failure. We leave as suggestions the tests we did in our presentation. For each failure scenario, observe how the cluster re-adjusts itself and the impact on read and write traffic.

1) Loss of Network Communication

• Unplug the network cable from one of the nodes (or simulate this condition in your VM):
  • First from a replica
  • Then from the primary
• Unplug the network cable from one replica and the primary at the same time:
  • Does Patroni experience a split-brain situation?

2) Power Outage

• Unplug the power cable from the primary
• Wait until the cluster is re-adjusted then plug the power cable back and start the node

3) SEGFAULT

Simulate an OOM/crash by killing the postmaster process in one of the nodes with kill -9.

4) Killing Patroni

Remember that Patroni is managing PostgreSQL. What happens if the Patroni process (and not PostgreSQL) is killed?

5) CPU Saturation

Simulate CPU saturation with a benchmark tool such as Sysbench, for example:

sysbench cpu --threads=10 --time=0 run

This one is a bit tricky as the reads and writes are each single-threaded operation. You may need to decrease the priority of the HAtester.py processes with renice, and possibly increase that of Sysbench’s.

6) Manual Switchover

Patroni facilitates changes in the PostgreSQL hierarchy. Switchover operations can be scheduled, the command below is interactive and will prompt you with options:

sudo -u postgres patronictl -c /etc/patroni/config.yml switchover

Alternatively, you can be specific and tell Patroni exactly what to do:

sudo -u postgres patronictl -c /etc/patroni/config.yml switchover --master node1 --candidate node2 --force

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We hope you had fun with this hands-on lab! If you have questions or comments, leave us a note in the comments section below!