Percona Distribution for PostgreSQL Operator Technical Preview Released

Percona Distribution for PostgreSQL Operator Technical Preview Released

Percona is championing open source database software and we are committed to running our products on Kubernetes. We don’t only want to run the software, but make sure that the database is highly available, secure, and follows best practices. We also focus on day-2 operations such as scaling, backup and restore, disaster recovery, and customization.

To get there, we have Operators – the software framework that extends Kubernetes APIs and provides control over database deployment and operations through the control plane. Until May we had two Operators:

• Percona Distribution for MySQL Operator
  • It uses the Percona XtraDB Cluster component to deploy a highly reliable MySQL database with synchronous replication based on Galera.
• Percona Distribution for MongoDB Operator
  • Production and enterprise-grade solution to run Percona Distribution for MongoDB on Kubernetes.

The only missing piece was Percona Distribution for PostgreSQL, for which we introduced the Operator during Percona Live in May 2021. This completes our vision for deploying our software on Kubernetes. See the release notes of the initial version here.

Kubernetes Operator FAQ

This blog post is intended to answer some frequently asked questions we received from our community about Percona Distribution for PostgreSQL Operator.

Is This a Brand New Operator?

No. Our Operator is based on PGO, the Postgres Operator from Crunchy Data, which we modified and enhanced in order to support our PostgreSQL distribution.

Why CrunchyData Operator?

As noted above, we are committed to running our database software on Kubernetes. There are multiple ways to achieve this goal:

1. Develop a new Operator from scratch
2. Collaborate and contribute necessary changes to an existing Operator
3. Fork an  existing Operator

Option (1) looks great, but it is time and effort-intensive, and we might be re-inventing existing wheels. Our goal is to minimize Time To Market (TTM), so we dropped this option right away.

For options (2) and (3), there are at least three different PostgreSQL Operators in active development:

Stackgres is written in Java, and our engineering team is more familiar with C/C++ and Golang. We do not see that changing in the near future. Zalando Operator is great and provides a lot of functionality out of the box, but our Engineering team estimated the effort to perform the needed changes almost similar to writing the Operator from scratch.

PGO is written in Golang and provides the features we were looking for: high availability with Patroni, scaling, backups, and many more. Our engineering team did not flag any complexity of introducing the changes and we jumped to work.

Will Percona use PGO as an Upstream?

For now – yes. We will be merging new features implemented in PGO into our fork. Version 0.1.0 of our Operator is based on the 4.6.2 version of PGO. Version 0.2.0 will be based on version 4.7.X. At the same time, we want to contribute back some of our changes to the upstream and have already sent some pull requests (one, two). We’ll continue submitting patches to the upstream project.

What is Different About Percona Operator?

The main differences were highlighted in the release notes. Here they are:

• Percona Distribution for PostgreSQL is now used as the main container image. CrunchyData container images are provided under Crunchy Data Developer Program, which means that without an active contract they could not be used for production. Percona container images are fully open source and do not have any limitations for use.
• It is possible to specify custom images for all components separately. For example, users can easily build and use custom images for one or several components (e.g. pgBouncer) while all other images will be the official ones. Also, users can build and use all custom images.
• All container images are reworked and simplified. They are built on Red Hat Universal Base Image (UBI) 8.
• The Operator has built-in integration with Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) v2.
• A build/test infrastructure was created, and we have started adding e2e tests to be sure that all pieces of the cluster work together as expected.
• We have phased out the PGO CLI tool, and the Custom Resource UX will be completely aligned with other Percona Operators in the following release.

For future releases, our goal is to cover the feature and UX parity between the Operators, so that our users will have the same look and feel for all three database engines.

What Does Tech Preview Mean?

Tech Preview Features are not yet ready for production use and are not included in support via SLA (Service License Agreement). They are included in this release so that users can provide feedback prior to the full release of the feature in a future GA (General Availability) release (or removal of the feature if it is deemed not useful). This functionality can change (APIs, CLIs, etc.) from tech preview to GA.

When is GA Coming and What is Going to be Included?

Our goal is to release the GA version early in Q3. The changes in this version would include:

• Moving control over replicas to the main Custom Resource instead of managing them separately
• Change the main manifest to provide the same look and feel as in other Percona Operators
• Rework scheduled backups and control them with main CR and Kubernetes primitives
• Add support for Google Cloud Storage (this will be merged from upstream)

Call for Action

To install our Operator and learn more about it please read the documentation.

Our Operator is licensed under Apache 2.0 and can be found in percona-postgresql-operator repository on Github. There are multiple ways to contact us or share your ideas:

• To report a bug use jira.percona.com and create the bug in K8SPG project
• For general questions and sharing your thoughts, we have a community forum or Discord where we chat about open source, databases, Kubernetes, and many more.
• We have a public roadmap where you can see what is planned and what is under development. You can share your ideas about new features there as well.