2 posts tagged with "highavailability"

In this post we will look at read replicas as an additional method to achieve multi zone availability for Cloud SQL, which gives us - in turn - the ability to offload (potentially expensive) IO operations such as user created backups or read operations without adding load to the master instance.

In the previous post in this series we looked at Regional availability for PostgreSQL HA using Cloud SQL:

Google Cloud SQL – Availability, Replication, Failover for PostgreSQL – Part I

Recall that this option was simple to implement and worked relatively seamlessly and transparently with respect to zonal failover.

Now let's look at read replicas in Cloud SQL as an additional measure for availability.

Deploying Read Replica(s)​

Deploying read replicas is slightly more involved than simple regional (high) availability, as you will need to define each replica or replicas as a separate Cloud SQL instance which is a slave to the primary instance (the master instance).

An example using Terraform is provided here, starting by creating the master instance:

Next you would specify one or more read replicas (typically in a zone other than the zone the master is in):

Note that several of the options supplied are omitted when creating a read replica database instance, such as the backup and maintenance options - as these operations cannot be performed on a read replica as we will see later.

Voila! You have just set up a master instance (the primary instance your application and/or users will connect to) along with a read replica in a different zone which will be asynchronously updated as changes occur on the master instance.

Read Replicas in Action​

Now that we have created a read replica, lets see it in action. After connecting to the read replica (like you would any other instance), attempt to access a table that has not been created on the master as shown here:

Now create the table and insert some data on the master instance:

Now try the select operation on the replica instance:

It works!

Some Points to Note about Cloud SQL Read Replicas​

• Users connect to a read replica as a normal database connection (as shown above)
• Google managed backups (using the console or gcloud sql backups create .. ) can NOT be performed against replica instances
• Read replicas can be used to offload IO intensive operations from the the master instance - such as user managed backup operations (e.g. pg_dump)

• BE CAREFUL Despite their name, read replicas are NOT read only, updates can be made which will NOT propagate back to the master instance - you could get yourself in an awful mess if you allow users to perform INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, CREATE or DROP operations against replica instances.

Promoting a Read Replica​

If required a read replica can be promoted to a standalone Cloud SQL instance, which is another DR option. Keep in mind however as the read replica is updated in an asynchronous manner, promotion of a read replica may result in a loss of data (hopefully not much but a loss nonetheless). Your application RPO will dictate if this is acceptable or not.

Promotion of a read replica is reasonably straightforward as demonstrated here using the console:

You can also use the following gcloud command:

gcloud sql instances promote-replica <replica_instance_name>

Once you click on the Promote Replica button you will see the following warning:

Promoting a read replica using the console

This simply states that once you promote the replica instance your instance will become an independent instance with no further relationship with the master instance. Once accepted and the promotion process is complete, you can see that you now have two independent Cloud SQL instances (as advertised!):

Some of the options you would normally configure with a master instance would need to be configured on the promoted replica instance - such as high availability, maintenance and scheduled backups - but in the event of a zonal failure you would be back up and running with virtually no data loss!

Full source code for this article is available at: https://github.com/gamma-data/cloud-sql-postgres-availability-tutorial

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In this multi part blog we will explore the features available in Google Cloud SQL for High Availability, Backup and Recovery, Replication and Failover and Security (at rest and in transit) for the PostgreSQL DBMS engine. Some of these features are relatively hot of the press and in Beta – which still makes them available for general use.

We will start by looking at the High Availability (HA) options available to you when using the PostgreSQL engine in Google Cloud SQL.

Most of you would be familiar with the concepts of High Availability, Redundancy, Fault Tolerance, etc but let’s start with a definition of HA anyway:

High availability (HA) is a characteristic of a system, which aims to ensure an agreed level of operational performance, usually uptime, for a higher than normal period.

Wikipedia

Higher than a normal period is quite subjective, typically this is quantified by a percentage represented by a number of “9s”, that is 99.99% (which would be quoted as “four nines”), this would allot you 52.60 minutes of downtime over a one-year period.

Essentially the number of 9’s required will drive your bias towards the options available to you for Cloud SQL HA.

We will start with Cloud SQL HA in its simplest form, Regional Availability.

Regional Availability​

Knowing what we know about the Google Cloud Platform, regional availability means that our application or service (in this case Cloud SQL) should be resilient to a failure of any one zone in our region. In fact, as all GCP regions have at least 3 zones – two zones could fail, and our application would still be available.

Regional availability for Cloud SQL (which Google refers to as High Availability), creates a standby instance in addition to the primary instance and uses a regional Persistent Disk resource to store the database instance data, transaction log and other state files, which is synchronously replicated to a Persistent Disk resource local to the zones that the primary and standby instances are located in.

A shared IP address (like a Virtual IP) is used to serve traffic to the healthy (normally primary) Cloud SQL instance.

An overview of Cloud SQL HA is shown here:

Implementing High Availability for Cloud SQL​

Implementing Regional Availability for Cloud SQL is dead simple, it is one argument:

availability_type = "REGIONAL"

Using the gcloud command line utility, this would be:

gcloud sql instances create postgresql-instance-1234 \
  --availability-type=REGIONAL \
  --database-version= POSTGRES_9_6

Using Terraform (with a complete set of options) it would look like:

resource "google_sql_database_instance" "postgres_ha" {
  provider = google-beta
  region = var.region
  project = var.project
  name = "postgresql-instance-${random_id.instance_suffix.hex}"
  database_version = "POSTGRES_9_6"
  settings {
   tier = var.tier
   disk_size = var.disk_size
   activation_policy = "ALWAYS"
   disk_autoresize = true
   disk_type = "PD_SSD"
   **availability_type = "REGIONAL"**
   backup_configuration {
     enabled = true
     start_time = "00:00"
   }
   ip_configuration  {
     ipv4_enabled = false
     private_network = google_compute_network.private_network.self_link
   }
   maintenance_window  {
     day = 7
     hour = 0
     update_track = "stable"
   }
  }
 } 

Once deployed you will notice a few different items in the console, first from the instance overview page you can see that the High Availability option is ENABLED for your instance.

Second, you will see a Failover button enabled on the detailed management view for this instance.

Failover​

Failovers and failbacks can be initiated manually or automatically (should the primary be unresponsive). A manual failover can be invoked by executing the command:

gcloud sql instances failover postgresql-instance-1234

There is an --async option which will return immediately, invoking the failover operation asynchronously.

Failover can also be invoked from the Cloud Console using the Failover button shown previously. As an example I have created a connection to a regionally available Cloud SQL instance and started a command which runs a loop and prints out a counter:

Now using the gcloud command shown earlier, I have invoked a manual failover of the Cloud SQL instance.

Once the failover is initiated, the client connection is dropped (as the server is momentarily unavailable):

The connection can be immediately re-established afterwards, the state of the running query is lost - importantly no data is lost however. If your application clients had retry logic in their code and they weren't executing a long running query, chances are no one would notice! Once reconnecting normal database activities can be resumed:

A quick check of the instance logs will show that the failover event has occured:

Now when you return to the instance page in the console you will see a Failback button, which indicates that your instance is being served by the standby:

Note that there may be a slight delay in the availability of this option as the replica is still being synched.

It is worth noting that nothing comes for free! When you run in REGIONAL or High Availability mode - you are effectively paying double the costs as compared to running in ZONAL mode. However availability and cost have always been trade-offs against one another - you get what you pay for...

More information can be found at: https://cloud.google.com/sql/docs/postgres/high-availability

Next up we will look at read replicas (and their ability to be promoted) as another high availability alternative in Cloud SQL.

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