Of Hippos, Whales, and Elephants - Crunchy Postgres on Docker

The June meeting will be held at 18:00 EST on Tues, the 27th. Once again, we will be holding the meeting in the community space at CoverMyMeds. Please RSVP on MeetUp so we have an idea on the amount of food needed.

Topic

Phil Vacca, of Crunchy Data fame, joins us this month to talk about containerized PostgreSQL!

The talk excerpt:

Containerization has captured the interest of developers, engineers, and business people everywhere. While BSD Jails and cgroups are established technologies in the open source world, it is the Docker project that has grabbed recent attention. Terms like stateless applications and microservices are now almost as ubiquitous as cloud computing, or virtualization before it. It is natural to wonder what, if anything, Docker offers to PostgreSQL deployment and administration.

Crunchy Data Solutions has built one of the best recognized Open Source PostgreSQL on Docker suites (https://github.com/CrunchyData/crunchy-containers), containing everything you need to run a PostgreSQL database solution - complete with replication, backups, failover, and appropriate monitoring - on Docker, Kubernetes, or OpenShift.

No specific knowledge of Docker containers is assumed for this talk. We will briefly discuss where the technology comes from, and how to get up and running with Docker; before diving into the really gory bits like how a Dockerfile is written, and where all the data is actually stored. Before we’re through we’ll see how quickly new nodes can be brought online with containers and streaming replication, and we’ll see what we can learn about failover from other highly distributed systems. We’ll even talk through logging and monitoring strategies.

Lastly we’ll discuss what all of this work really does for us as technologists. We’ll get an overview of the many Platform as a Service offerings that leverage containers, and try to predict some things about where application and data center design are going. Hopefully, containerization inspires us to explore the ever growing feature set of our favorite database, PostgreSQL, in new and different ways.

Phil is a Senior Software Engineer at Crunchy Data Solutions where he works alongside leading PostgreSQL experts on a wide variety of research and development topics. He is interested in combining a DevOps philosophy with database administration, and has spoken on topics including Postgres on Docker and Full Text Search in Postgres at national PG conferences. Phil can be found extolling the virtues of the world’s most advanced open source database as a member of pgMKE: the Milwaukee Postgres User’s Group.

Parking

Please park at a meter on the street or in the parking garage (see below). You can safely ignore any sign saying to not park in the garage as long as it’s after 17:30 when you arrive. Park on the first level in any space that is not marked ‘24 hour reserved’. Once parked, take the elevator to the 3rd floor to reach the Miranova lobby.

Finding us

The elevator bank is in the back of the building. Take a left and walk down the hall until you see the elevator bank on your right. Grab an elevator up to the 11th floor. Once you exit the elevator, look to your left and right. One side will have visible cubicles, the other won’t. Head to the side without cubicles. You’re now in the community space. The kitchen is to your right (grab yourself a drink) and the meeting will be held to your left. Walk down the room towards the stage.

If you have any issues or questions with parking or the elevators, feel free to text/call Doug at +1.614.316.5079