Tell HN: Gitlab is splitting their main and ci Postgres DBs
Just tried to use some GitLab repos I have and ran into a well specified 503 error page:
> We are splitting our database into Main and CI! > > For more information about what we're up to, you can check out our blog article. For progress updates, please check our status page.
https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2022/06/02/splitting-database-into-main-and-ci/
Don't know how I missed it, but it's pretty nice that the downtime is clearly specified, and the blog post (and related posts) were very informative.
Some random thoughts below:
> GitLab.com's database architecture uses a single PostgreSQL database cluster. This single cluster (let's call it main), consists of a single primary and multiple read-only replicas and stores the data generated by all GitLab features. Database reads can be scaled horizontally through read-only replicas, but writes cannot because PostgreSQL does not support active-active replication natively.
All you need is Postgres. IIRC Reddit had a similar starting story.
Excited to see how much faster gitlab.com will be and how much more reliable their CI gets (I don't have numbers on hand, but I think they've gone down less than GH Actions in recent memory at least -- maybe there's some recency bias there).
In a world where Citus is now fully open source[1], I wonder if it needs to just get pulled into contrib.
[0]: https://opencoreventures.com/
[1]: https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2022/06/17/citus-11-goes-fully-open-source/