Automated upgrades of PostgreSQL clusters in cloud

In the talk, we will try to show how to solve the major version upgrade problem by using the power of logical decoding which is available in PostgreSQL versions 9.4 and later. The solution is achieved by using pglogical (https://2ndquadrant.com/en/resources/pglogical/) and automating the upgrade process with Ansible (https://www.ansible.com/) software automation tool. Pglogical is a third party open source extension for database replication.

One of the biggest challenges regarding upgrading PostgreSQL is the requirement of a downtime. Many companies do have an upgrade window, and they might afford some downtime during database upgrade. However, thanks to fast growth of data volumes in recent years, few companies can manage to complete the upgrade within the possible maintenance window. On top of this, there are many businesses that would not allow a maintenance for database upgrades at all (i.e payment systems, online banking and money transfer companies, nuclear plants, space technologies, telecoms). Both business owners and the users prefer not to experience a downtime, this leads to efforts to avoid downtime as much as possible. In modern systems, zero downtime upgrades is a big need and in fact, can be achieved.

In the talk, we will try to show how to solve the major version upgrade problem by using the power of logical decoding which is available in PostgreSQL versions 9.4 and later. The solution is achieved by using pglogical [https://2ndquadrant.com/en/resources/pglogical/] and automating the upgrade process with Ansible [https://www.ansible.com/] software automation tool. Pglogical is a third party open source extension for database replication.