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Administrator Guide

Learn how to configure and manage the Postgres Operator in your Kubernetes (K8s) environment.

Minor and major version upgrade

Minor version upgrades for PostgreSQL are handled via updating the Spilo Docker image. The operator will carry out a rolling update of Pods which includes a switchover (planned failover) of the master to the Pod with new minor version. The switch should usually take less than 5 seconds, still clients have to reconnect.

Major version upgrades are supported via cloning. The new cluster manifest must have a higher version string than the source cluster and will be created from a basebackup. Depending of the cluster size, downtime in this case can be significant as writes to the database should be stopped and all WAL files should be archived first before cloning is started.

Note, that simply changing the version string in the postgresql manifest does not work at present and leads to errors. Neither Patroni nor Postgres Operator can do in place pg_upgrade. Still, it can be executed manually in the Postgres container, which is tricky (i.e. systems need to be stopped, replicas have to be synced) but of course faster than cloning.

CRD Validation

CustomResourceDefinitions will be registered with schema validation by default when the operator is deployed. The OperatorConfiguration CRD will only get created if the POSTGRES_OPERATOR_CONFIGURATION_OBJECT environment variable in the deployment yaml is set and not empty.

When submitting manifests of postgresql or OperatorConfiguration custom resources with kubectl, validation can be bypassed with --validate=false. The operator can also be configured to not register CRDs with validation on ADD or UPDATE events. Running instances are not affected when enabling the validation afterwards unless the manifests is not changed then. Note, that the provided CRD manifests contain the validation for users to understand what schema is enforced.

Once the validation is enabled it can only be disabled manually by editing or patching the CRD manifest:

zk8 patch crd postgresqls.acid.zalan.do -p '{"spec":{"validation": null}}'

Non-default cluster domain

If your cluster uses a DNS domain other than the default cluster.local, this needs to be set in the operator configuration (cluster_domain variable). This is used by the operator to connect to the clusters after creation.

Namespaces

Select the namespace to deploy to

The operator can run in a namespace other than default. For example, to use the test namespace, run the following before deploying the operator's manifests:

kubectl create namespace test
kubectl config set-context $(kubectl config current-context) --namespace=test

All subsequent kubectl commands will work with the test namespace. The operator will run in this namespace and look up needed resources - such as its ConfigMap - there. Please note that the namespace for service accounts and cluster role bindings in operator RBAC rules needs to be adjusted to the non-default value.

Specify the namespace to watch

Watching a namespace for an operator means tracking requests to change Postgres clusters in the namespace such as "increase the number of Postgres replicas to 5" and reacting to the requests, in this example by actually scaling up.

By default, the operator watches the namespace it is deployed to. You can change this by setting the WATCHED_NAMESPACE var in the env section of the operator deployment manifest or by altering the watched_namespace field in the operator configuration. In the case both are set, the env var takes the precedence. To make the operator listen to all namespaces, explicitly set the field/env var to "*".

Note that for an operator to manage pods in the watched namespace, the operator's service account (as specified in the operator deployment manifest) has to have appropriate privileges to access the watched namespace. The operator may not be able to function in the case it watches all namespaces but lacks access rights to any of them (except K8s system namespaces like kube-system). The reason is that for multiple namespaces operations such as 'list pods' execute at the cluster scope and fail at the first violation of access rights.

Operators with defined ownership of certain Postgres clusters

By default, multiple operators can only run together in one K8s cluster when isolated into their own namespaces. But, it is also possible to define ownership between operator instances and Postgres clusters running all in the same namespace or K8s cluster without interfering.

First, define the CONTROLLER_ID environment variable in the operator deployment manifest. Then specify the ID in every Postgres cluster manifest you want this operator to watch using the "acid.zalan.do/controller" annotation:

apiVersion: "acid.zalan.do/v1"
kind: postgresql
metadata:
  name: demo-cluster
  annotations:
    "acid.zalan.do/controller": "second-operator"
spec:
  ...

Every other Postgres cluster which lacks the annotation will be ignored by this operator. Conversely, operators without a defined CONTROLLER_ID will ignore clusters with defined ownership of another operator.

Role-based access control for the operator

The manifest operator-service-account-rbac.yaml defines the service account, cluster roles and bindings needed for the operator to function under access control restrictions. The file also includes a cluster role postgres-pod with privileges for Patroni to watch and manage pods and endpoints. To deploy the operator with this RBAC policies use:

kubectl create -f manifests/configmap.yaml
kubectl create -f manifests/operator-service-account-rbac.yaml
kubectl create -f manifests/postgres-operator.yaml
kubectl create -f manifests/minimal-postgres-manifest.yaml

Namespaced service account and role binding

For each namespace the operator watches it creates (or reads) a service account and role binding to be used by the Postgres Pods. The service account is bound to the postgres-pod cluster role. The name and definitions of these resources can be configured. Note, that the operator performs no further syncing of namespaced service accounts and role bindings.

Give K8s users access to create/list postgresqls

By default postgresql custom resources can only be listed and changed by cluster admins. To allow read and/or write access to other human users apply the user-facing-clusterrole manifest:

kubectl create -f manifests/user-facing-clusterroles.yaml

It creates zalando-postgres-operator:user:view, :edit and :admin clusterroles that are aggregated into the K8s default roles.

Use taints and tolerations for dedicated PostgreSQL nodes

To ensure Postgres pods are running on nodes without any other application pods, you can use taints and tolerations and configure the required toleration in the operator configuration.

As an example you can set following node taint:

kubectl taint nodes <nodeName> postgres=:NoSchedule

And configure the toleration for the Postgres pods by adding following line to the ConfigMap:

apiVersion: v1
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
  name: postgres-operator
data:
  toleration: "key:postgres,operator:Exists,effect:NoSchedule"

For an OperatorConfiguration resource the toleration should be defined like this:

apiVersion: "acid.zalan.do/v1"
kind: OperatorConfiguration
metadata:
  name: postgresql-configuration
configuration:
  kubernetes:
    toleration:
      postgres: "key:postgres,operator:Exists,effect:NoSchedule"

Note that the K8s version 1.13 brings taint-based eviction to the beta stage and enables it by default. Postgres pods by default receive tolerations for unreachable and noExecute taints with the timeout of 5m. Depending on your setup, you may want to adjust these parameters to prevent master pods from being evicted by the K8s runtime. To prevent eviction completely, specify the toleration by leaving out the tolerationSeconds value (similar to how Kubernetes' own DaemonSets are configured)

Enable pod anti affinity

To ensure Postgres pods are running on different topologies, you can use pod anti affinity and configure the required topology in the operator configuration.

Enable pod anti affinity by adding following line to the operator ConfigMap:

apiVersion: v1
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
  name: postgres-operator
data:
  enable_pod_antiaffinity: "true"

Likewise, when using an OperatorConfiguration resource add:

apiVersion: "acid.zalan.do/v1"
kind: OperatorConfiguration
metadata:
  name: postgresql-configuration
configuration:
  kubernetes:
    enable_pod_antiaffinity: true

By default the topology key for the pod anti affinity is set to kubernetes.io/hostname, you can set another topology key e.g. failure-domain.beta.kubernetes.io/zone. See built-in node labels for available topology keys.

Pod Disruption Budget

By default the operator uses a PodDisruptionBudget (PDB) to protect the cluster from voluntarily disruptions and hence unwanted DB downtime. The MinAvailable parameter of the PDB is set to 1 which prevents killing masters in single-node clusters and/or the last remaining running instance in a multi-node cluster.

The PDB is only relaxed in two scenarios:

  • If a cluster is scaled down to 0 instances (e.g. for draining nodes)
  • If the PDB is disabled in the configuration (enable_pod_disruption_budget)

The PDB is still in place having MinAvailable set to 0. If enabled it will be automatically set to 1 on scale up. Disabling PDBs helps avoiding blocking Kubernetes upgrades in managed K8s environments at the cost of prolonged DB downtime. See PR #384 for the use case.

Add cluster-specific labels

In some cases, you might want to add labels that are specific to a given Postgres cluster, in order to identify its child objects. The typical use case is to add labels that identifies the Pods created by the operator, in order to implement fine-controlled NetworkPolicies.

postgres-operator ConfigMap

apiVersion: v1
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
  name: postgres-operator
data:
  inherited_labels: application,environment

OperatorConfiguration

apiVersion: "acid.zalan.do/v1"
kind: OperatorConfiguration
metadata:
  name: postgresql-operator-configuration
configuration:
  kubernetes:
    inherited_labels:
    - application
    - environment

cluster manifest

apiVersion: "acid.zalan.do/v1"
kind: postgresql
metadata:
  name: demo-cluster
  labels:
    application: my-app
    environment: demo
spec:
  ...

network policy

kind: NetworkPolicy
apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
metadata:
  name: netpol-example
spec:
  podSelector:
    matchLabels:
      application: my-app
      environment: demo

Custom Pod Environment Variables

It is possible to configure a ConfigMap which is used by the Postgres pods as an additional provider for environment variables. One use case is to customize the Spilo image and configure it with environment variables. The ConfigMap with the additional settings is referenced in the operator's main configuration. A namespace can be specified along with the name. If left out, the configured default namespace of your K8s client will be used and if the ConfigMap is not found there, the Postgres cluster's namespace is taken when different:

postgres-operator ConfigMap

apiVersion: v1
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
  name: postgres-operator
data:
  # referencing config map with custom settings
  pod_environment_configmap: default/postgres-pod-config

OperatorConfiguration

apiVersion: "acid.zalan.do/v1"
kind: OperatorConfiguration
metadata:
  name: postgresql-operator-configuration
configuration:
  kubernetes:
    # referencing config map with custom settings
    pod_environment_configmap: default/postgres-pod-config

referenced ConfigMap postgres-pod-config

apiVersion: v1
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
  name: postgres-pod-config
  namespace: default
data:
  MY_CUSTOM_VAR: value

This ConfigMap is then added as a source of environment variables to the Postgres StatefulSet/pods.

Limiting the number of min and max instances in clusters

As a preventive measure, one can restrict the minimum and the maximum number of instances permitted by each Postgres cluster managed by the operator. If either min_instances or max_instances is set to a non-zero value, the operator may adjust the number of instances specified in the cluster manifest to match either the min or the max boundary. For instance, of a cluster manifest has 1 instance and the min_instances is set to 3, the cluster will be created with 3 instances. By default, both parameters are set to -1.

Load balancers and allowed IP ranges

For any Postgres/Spilo cluster, the operator creates two separate K8s services: one for the master pod and one for replica pods. To expose these services to an outer network, one can attach load balancers to them by setting enableMasterLoadBalancer and/or enableReplicaLoadBalancer to true in the cluster manifest. In the case any of these variables are omitted from the manifest, the operator configuration settings enable_master_load_balancer and enable_replica_load_balancer apply. Note that the operator settings affect all Postgresql services running in all namespaces watched by the operator. If load balancing is enabled two default annotations will be applied to its services:

  • external-dns.alpha.kubernetes.io/hostname with the value defined by the operator configs master_dns_name_format and replica_dns_name_format. This value can't be overwritten. If any changing in its value is needed, it MUST be done changing the DNS format operator config parameters; and
  • service.beta.kubernetes.io/aws-load-balancer-connection-idle-timeout with a default value of "3600". This value can be overwritten with the operator config parameter custom_service_annotations or the cluster parameter serviceAnnotations.

To limit the range of IP addresses that can reach a load balancer, specify the desired ranges in the allowedSourceRanges field (applies to both master and replica load balancers). To prevent exposing load balancers to the entire Internet, this field is set at cluster creation time to 127.0.0.1/32 unless overwritten explicitly. If you want to revoke all IP ranges from an existing cluster, please set the allowedSourceRanges field to 127.0.0.1/32 or to an empty sequence []. Setting the field to null or omitting it entirely may lead to K8s removing this field from the manifest due to its handling of null fields. Then the resultant manifest will not contain the necessary change, and the operator will respectively do nothing with the existing source ranges.

Running periodic 'autorepair' scans of K8s objects

The Postgres Operator periodically scans all K8s objects belonging to each cluster and repairs all discrepancies between them and the definitions generated from the current cluster manifest. There are two types of scans:

  • sync scan, running every resync_period seconds for every cluster

  • repair scan, coming every repair_period only for those clusters that didn't report success as a result of the last operation applied to them.

Postgres roles supported by the operator

The operator is capable of maintaining roles of multiple kinds within a Postgres database cluster:

  • System roles are roles necessary for the proper work of Postgres itself such as a replication role or the initial superuser role. The operator delegates creating such roles to Patroni and only establishes relevant secrets.

  • Infrastructure roles are roles for processes originating from external systems, e.g. monitoring robots. The operator creates such roles in all Postgres clusters it manages, assuming that K8s secrets with the relevant credentials exist beforehand.

  • Per-cluster robot users are also roles for processes originating from external systems but defined for an individual Postgres cluster in its manifest. A typical example is a role for connections from an application that uses the database.

  • Human users originate from the Teams API that returns a list of the team members given a team id. The operator differentiates between (a) product teams that own a particular Postgres cluster and are granted admin rights to maintain it, and (b) Postgres superuser teams that get the superuser access to all Postgres databases running in a K8s cluster for the purposes of maintaining and troubleshooting.

Understanding rolling update of Spilo pods

The operator logs reasons for a rolling update with the info level and a diff between the old and new StatefulSet specs with the debug level. To benefit from numerous escape characters in the latter log entry, view it in CLI with echo -e. Note that the resultant message will contain some noise because the PodTemplate used by the operator is yet to be updated with the default values used internally in K8s.

The operator also support lazy updates of the Spilo image. That means the pod template of a PG cluster's stateful set is updated immediately with the new image, but no rolling update follows. This feature saves you a switchover - and hence downtime - when you know pods are re-started later anyway, for instance due to the node rotation. To force a rolling update, disable this mode by setting the enable_lazy_spilo_upgrade to false in the operator configuration and restart the operator pod. With the standard eager rolling updates the operator checks during Sync all pods run images specified in their respective statefulsets. The operator triggers a rolling upgrade for PG clusters that violate this condition.

Logical backups

The operator can manage K8s cron jobs to run logical backups of Postgres clusters. The cron job periodically spawns a batch job that runs a single pod. The backup script within this pod's container can connect to a DB for a logical backup. The operator updates cron jobs during Sync if the job schedule changes; the job name acts as the job identifier. These jobs are to be enabled for each individual Postgres cluster by setting enableLogicalBackup: true in its manifest. Notes:

  1. The example image implements the backup via pg_dumpall and upload of compressed and encrypted results to an S3 bucket; the default image registry.opensource.zalan.do/acid/logical-backup is the same image built with the Zalando-internal CI pipeline. pg_dumpall requires a superuser access to a DB and runs on the replica when possible.

  2. Due to the limitation of K8s cron jobs it is highly advisable to set up additional monitoring for this feature; such monitoring is outside of the scope of operator responsibilities.

  3. The operator does not remove old backups.

  4. You may use your own image by overwriting the relevant field in the operator configuration. Any such image must ensure the logical backup is able to finish in presence of pod restarts and simultaneous invocations of the backup cron job.

  5. For that feature to work, your RBAC policy must enable operations on the cronjobs resource from the batch API group for the operator service account. See example RBAC

Access to cloud resources from clusters in non-cloud environment

To access cloud resources like S3 from a cluster on bare metal you can use additional_secret_mount and additional_secret_mount_path configuration parameters. The cloud credentials will be provisioned in the Postgres containers by mounting an additional volume from the given secret to database pods. They can then be accessed over the configured mount path. Via Custom Pod Environment Variables you can point different cloud SDK's (AWS, GCP etc.) to this mounted secret, e.g. to access cloud resources for uploading logs etc.

A secret can be pre-provisioned in different ways:

  • Generic secret created via kubectl create secret generic some-cloud-creds --from-file=some-cloud-credentials-file.json
  • Automatically provisioned via a custom K8s controller like kube-aws-iam-controller

Sidecars for Postgres clusters

A list of sidecars is added to each cluster created by the operator. The default is empty.

kind: OperatorConfiguration
configuration:
  sidecars:
  - image: image:123
    name: global-sidecar
    ports:
    - containerPort: 80
    volumeMounts:
    - mountPath: /custom-pgdata-mountpoint
      name: pgdata
  - ...

In addition to any environment variables you specify, the following environment variables are always passed to sidecars:

  • POD_NAME - field reference to metadata.name
  • POD_NAMESPACE - field reference to metadata.namespace
  • POSTGRES_USER - the superuser that can be used to connect to the database
  • POSTGRES_PASSWORD - the password for the superuser

Setting up the Postgres Operator UI

Since the v1.2 release the Postgres Operator is shipped with a browser-based configuration user interface (UI) that simplifies managing Postgres clusters with the operator.

Building the UI image

The UI runs with Node.js and comes with it's own Docker image. However, installing Node.js to build the operator UI is not required. It is handled via Docker containers when running:

make docker

Configure endpoints and options

The UI talks to the K8s API server as well as the Postgres Operator REST API. K8s API server URLs are loaded from the machine's kubeconfig environment by default. Alternatively, a list can also be passed when starting the Python application with the --cluster option.

The Operator API endpoint can be configured via the OPERATOR_API_URL environment variables in the deployment manifest. You can also expose the operator API through a service. Some displayed options can be disabled from UI using simple flags under the OPERATOR_UI_CONFIG field in the deployment.

Deploy the UI on K8s

Now, apply all manifests from the ui/manifests folder to deploy the Postgres Operator UI on K8s. Replace the image tag in the deployment manifest if you want to test the image you've built with make docker. Make sure the pods for the operator and the UI are both running.

sed -e "s/\(image\:.*\:\).*$/\1$TAG/" manifests/deployment.yaml | kubectl apply -f manifests/
kubectl get all -l application=postgres-operator-ui

Local testing

For local testing you need to apply K8s proxying and operator pod port forwarding so that the UI can talk to the K8s and Postgres Operator REST API. The Ingress resource is not needed. You can use the provided run_local.sh script for this. Make sure that:

  • Python dependencies are installed on your machine
  • the K8s API server URL is set for kubectl commands, e.g. for minikube it would usually be https://192.168.99.100:8443.
  • the pod label selectors for port forwarding are correct

When testing with minikube you have to build the image in its docker environment (running make docker doesn't do it for you). From the ui directory execute:

# compile and build operator UI
make docker

# build in image in minikube docker env
eval $(minikube docker-env)
docker build -t registry.opensource.zalan.do/acid/postgres-operator-ui:v1.3.0 .

# apply UI manifests next to a running Postgres Operator
kubectl apply -f manifests/

# install python dependencies to run UI locally
pip3 install -r requirements
./run_local.sh