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PostgreSQL Automatic Failover

High-Availibility for Postgres, based on industry references Pacemaker and Corosync.

Description

Pacemaker is nowadays the industry reference for High Availability. In the same fashion than for Systemd, all Linux distributions moved (or are moving) to this unique Pacemaker+Corosync stack, removing all other existing high availability stacks (CMAN, RGManager, OpenAIS, ...). It is able to detect failure on various services and automatically decide to failover the failing resource to another node when possible.

To be able to manage a specific service resource, Pacemaker interact with it through a so-called "Resource Agent". Resource agents must comply to the OCF specification which define what they must implement (start, stop, promote, etc), how they should behave and inform Pacemaker of their results.

PostgreSQL Automatic Failover is a new OCF resource Agent dedicated to PostgreSQL. Its original wish is to keep a clear limit between the Pacemaker administration and the PostgreSQL one, to keep things simple, documented and yet powerful.

Once your PostgreSQL cluster built using internal streaming replication, PAF is able to expose to Pacemaker what is the current status of the PostgreSQL instance on each node: master, slave, stopped, catching up, etc. Should a failure occurs on the master, Pacemaker will try to recover it by default. Should the failure be non-recoverable, PAF allows the slaves to be able to elect the best of them (the closest one to the old master) and promote it as the new master. All of this thanks to the robust, feature-full and most importantly experienced project: Pacemaker.

For information about how to install this agent, see INSTALL.md.

Setup and requirements

PAF supports PostgreSQL 9.3 and higher. It has been extensively tested under CentOS 6 and 7 in various scenario.

PAF has been written to give to the administrator the maximum control over their PostgreSQL configuration and architecture. Thus, you are 100% responsible for the master/slave creations and their setup. The agent will NOT edit your setup. It only requires you to follow these pre-requisites:

When setting up the resource in Pacemaker, here are the available parameters you can set:

For a demonstration about how to setup a cluster, see http://clusterlabs.github.io/PAF/documentation.html.