Go ahead, self-host Postgres

Re:Go ahead, self-host Postgres by mystifyingpoi on Saturday December 20, 2025 @01:43PM (#46338457)

Docker Compose (ignoring Swarm which seems to be obsolete) manages containers on a single machine. With Kubernetes, the pod that hosts the database is a pod like any other (I assume). It gets moved to a healthy machine when node goes bad, respects CPU/mem limits, works with generic monitoring tools, can be deployed from GitOps tools etc. All the k8s goodies apply.

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Re:Go ahead, self-host Postgres by Nextgrid on Saturday December 20, 2025 @02:11PM (#46338686)

When it comes to a DB moving the process around is easy, it's the data that matters. The reason bare-metal-hosted DBs are so fast is that they use direct-attach storage instead of networked storage. You lose those speed advantages if you move to distributed storage (Ceph/etc).

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Re:Go ahead, self-host Postgres by ninkendo on Saturday December 20, 2025 @02:45PM (#46338939)

You don’t need to use networked storage, the zalando postgres operator just uses local storage on the host. It uses a StatefulSet underneath so that pods will stay on the same node until you migrate them.

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Re:Go ahead, self-host Postgres by Nextgrid on Saturday December 20, 2025 @03:00PM (#46339067)

But if I'm pinning it to dedicated machines then Kubernetes does not give me anything, but I still have to deal with its tradeoffs and moving parts - which from experience are more likely to bring me down than actual hardware failure.

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Re:Go ahead, self-host Postgres by lukaslalinsky on Sunday December 21, 2025 @06:38AM (#46344100)

I run PostgreSQL+Patroni on Kubernetes where each instance is a separate StatefulSet pinned to dedicated hosts, with data on local ZFS volumes, provisioned by the OpenEBS controller.

I do this for multiple reasons, one is that I find it easier to use Kubernetes as the backend for Patroni, rather than running/securing/maintaining just another etcd cluster. But I also do it for observability, it's much nicer to be able to pull all the metrics and logs from all the components. Sure, it's possible to set that up without Kubernetes, but why if I can have the logs delivered just one way. Plus, I prefer how self-documenting the whole thing is. No one likes YAML manifests, but they are essentially running documentation that can't get out of sync.

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Re:Go ahead, self-host Postgres by ninkendo on Sunday December 21, 2025 @12:07PM (#46346273)

It’s not like anyone’s recommending you setup k8s just to use Postgres. The advice is that, if you’re already using k8s, the Postgres operator is pretty great, and you should try it instead of using a hosted Postgres offering or having a separate set of dedicated (non-k8s) servers just for Postgres.

I will say that even though the StatefulSet pins the pod to a node, it still has advantages. The StatefulSet can be scaled to N nodes, and if one goes down, failover is automatic. Then you have a choice as an admin to either recover the node, or just delete the pod and let the operator recreate it on some other node. When it gets recreated, it resyncs from the new primary and becomes a replica and you’re back to full health, it’s all pretty easy IMO.

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