History of Engine Yard's relationship with PostgreSQL. How we went from minimal PostgreSQL support to making it our new default. Video is available here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFfJjfOk9NA

1. Postgres
is the new default
How we transitioned our platform
and why you should too

2. I work with
Data!

3. Agenda
• Where we were
• Our relationship
with Postgres
• Challenges
• Our future together

4. We live in
The Cloud!

5. Engine Yard
• Languages
• Amazing Support
• Team DBAs & me
• 2 Products *

6. > 1 Petabyte

7. No multi-tenancy.

8. ...A year (or so) ago

9. Engine Yard Cloud
• Only MySQL 5.0
• 8.3 in perpetual Alpha
• No Slaves, No Docs
• Increasing interest
• Stack Expansion - DIRTT

10. Our Relationship
with Postgres

11. Stage 1
Infatuation

12. Why love Postgres?
• Flexible Replication:
streaming & hot standby
• Features & Extensions
• Versatile Data Types
• FDWs

13. Why love Postgres?
• All of the Indexes!
• B-tree, GiST, GIN, SP-Gist*
• Procedural Languages (PL)
• Full-Text Search

14. Why love Postgres?
• Feature parity with
Managed
• Outstanding community &
commercial support
• Let’s make it our default!

15. Stage 2
Understanding

16. Re-Tool
• MySQL Shop
• DBA Training: DBAs &
Engineers
• OSS to help us gain
velocity

17. Customer Education
• Customer Facing Docs
focused on MySQL
• Technical Writers FTW!

18. Stage 3
Disturbances

19. Roadmap issues
• Shiny new process
for DB releases
• Alpha, Beta, GA
• Surprise we got
it WRONG!

20. Multiple Architectures
• EBS Volumes & 32-bit
instance sizes
• Dump & Restore only
way to vertically scale

21. Bad Assumptions
• Product codebase tied
to old assumptions
• MySQL everywhere
• Refactor!

22. Stage 5
Moulding

23. Company-Wide Effort

24. Installation
• Engine Yard Cloud
• Chef > EBS
• Engine Yard Managed
• Puppet > Storage

25. Configuration
• $PGDATA on EBS
• We don’t RAID
• Snapshots to S3
• pg_xlog same volume

26. Replication
• Archiving on db_master
• hot_standby slaves
• All slaves <> AZs
• Smaller slaves

27. Monitoring
• Bucardo’s check_postgres
• Collectd & Nagios
• Process health, replication,
checkpoints - MORE

28. Backups
• Internal tool wraps around
pg_dump
• Snapshots & dumps to S3
• Only backup from slave (if
present)

29. Allow Extensions
• Dedicated instances
• Customizations OK!
• Ship recipes for ~30
extensions
• Curated & tested

30. Architectures
• New instance types:
64-bit small, mediums
• Standardized instances
architecture 64-bit

31. Stage 9
Happiness
& Trust

32. Future Directions
• 9.2 Support
• AWS Optimizations
• Provisioned IOPS
• EBS optimized instances
• SSD-backed instances

33. Future Directions
• Painless upgrades
• Better extensions
• Ugh to cookbooks!
• HA/DR

34. Future Directions
• Customer education
still a problem
• Low adoption of slaves
• ~146 year ago
• ~165 now

35. Give us a try!

36. Questions?
@RandomMood