2 posts tagged with "replication"

Single-zone high availability is wonderful right up until the zone itself is the thing that breaks. A blown rack, a batched datacenter maintenance window, a regional routing incident, and every replica you so carefully provisioned next to your primary goes dark at the exact same moment. Today that stops being your problem to solve by hand. FoundryDB v0.8.0 ships cross-zone clusters: one managed database, spread across three zones, privately peered, with streaming replication that stays on the cloud backbone and never crosses the public internet.

This is the database property you always wanted and never wanted to build yourself. You ask for three zones, and you get a primary in one, replicas in the other two, a private peering mesh wiring them together, and two DNS records that already point at the right nodes. No second cluster to babysit. No VPN to watch. No 3am page because a replication slot filled up while you were asleep.

Most PostgreSQL workloads are read-heavy. Dashboards, reporting queries, search, and API endpoints that serve cached-but-still-queried data all put pressure on a single primary. Vertical scaling helps, but at some point you are paying for CPU that only writes use while reads compete for the same connections.

Read replicas solve this by giving you additional PostgreSQL nodes that serve read queries from a continuously updated copy of your data. On FoundryDB, adding a replica takes one API call and a few minutes of provisioning time.