PostgreSQL across clouds and on-premises with Crossplane and Rook

blog.crossplane.io

8 points·melsmo··4 comments

When a developer requests a Postgres database it may substitute CochroachDB without warning? Sketchy. They could at least use Stolon or something.

The intent is that the app dev only cares about getting a database that speaks postgres on the wire (which CockroachDB does). The administrator, via a ResourceClass, gets to specify the actual infrastructure that gets deployed to fulfill that need for postgres. That could be Cloud SQL, or RDS, or even CockroachDB. To the app dev that just needs postgres, those are all the same. Crossplane is already doing similar "dynamic provisioning" for MySQL, Kubernetes clusters, object storage buckets and with more to come like key value stores, message queues, caches, etc.

This is very similar to how a StorageClass is used when a pod asks for a volume. The admin specifies if that's a Google PersistentDisk or Amazon EBS or Ceph RBD, etc. The pod doesn't have to care, it just gets its request for a volume fulfilled.

I'll have to look more into Stolon, that could be interesting here, thanks for that pointer.

(source: i'm a maintainer on both crossplane and rook)

AFAIK "speaks postgres on the wire" is far from the same as being fully compatible.

This article on their blog gets into the compatibility that cockroachdb offers and why they even decided to do that in the first place: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/why-postgres/

It's also very useful to be portable across many cloud providers (in addition to on-premises), which is what crossplane is providing for your apps. In terms of databases, Amazon RDS, Google Cloud SQL, and Azure PostgreSQL are all abstracted away from the developer so that their application should work across those without changes as well.

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