Customizing PostgreSQL parameters in EDB containers in MiniShift/OpenShift

This blog refers to an older version of EDB’s Postgres on Kubernetes offering that is no longer available.

In the last two posts we deployed an EDB database container and two pgpool instances and then scaled that up to include a read only replica. In this post will use a ConfigMap to adjust parameters in postgresql.conf as you will probably need to do that when you start using the EDB containers in your environment.

A ConfigMap is an object that can be used to provide parameter/values pairs to the container which then will be added to postgresql.conf file of the database containers. Creating a ConfigMap is quite easy, all you need to do is to create a file called “postgresql.conf.in” which lists all the parameters you want to get adjusted:

dwe@dwe:~$ cat /opt/ConfigMaps/postgresql.conf.in
work_mem='12MB'
shared_buffers='56MB'

In that case we want to adjust work_mem and shared_buffers, that’s it. To load that into OpenShift by using the oc command line utility:

dwe@dwe:~$ oc create configmap postgres-map --from-file=/opt/ConfigMaps/postgresql.conf.in
configmap "postgres-map" created
11:01:22 dwe@dwe:~$ oc get configmaps postgres-map
NAME           DATA      AGE
postgres-map   1         12m
dwe@dwe:~$ oc get configmaps postgres-map -o yaml
apiVersion: v1
data:
  postgresql.conf.in: |+
    work_mem='12MB'
    shared_buffers='56MB'

kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
  creationTimestamp: 2018-05-18T08:49:35Z
  name: postgres-map
  namespace: myproject
  resourceVersion: "16618"
  selfLink: /api/v1/namespaces/myproject/configmaps/postgres-map
  uid: 63c3a154-5a78-11e8-992f-ca15bcd30222

The issue is now that our current template does not know anything about that ConfigMap. So either adjust it or create a new one like this (changes are highlighted):

cat edb-as10-0-edb-cust.yaml
apiVersion: v1
kind: Template
metadata:
   name: edb-as10-custom
   annotations:
    description: "Custom EDB Postgres Advanced Server 10.0 Deployment Config"
    tags: "database,epas,postgres,postgresql"
    iconClass: "icon-postgresql"
objects:
- apiVersion: v1 
  kind: Service
  metadata:
    name: ${DATABASE_NAME}-service 
    labels:
      role: loadbalancer
      cluster: ${DATABASE_NAME}
  spec:
    selector:                  
      lb: ${DATABASE_NAME}-pgpool
    ports:
    - name: lb 
      port: ${PGPORT}
      targetPort: 9999
    sessionAffinity: None
    type: LoadBalancer
- apiVersion: v1 
  kind: DeploymentConfig
  metadata:
    name: ${DATABASE_NAME}-pgpool
  spec:
    replicas: 2
    selector:
      lb: ${DATABASE_NAME}-pgpool
    strategy:
      resources: {}
      rollingParams:
        intervalSeconds: 1
        maxSurge: 25%
        maxUnavailable: 25%
        timeoutSeconds: 600
        updatePeriodSeconds: 1
      type: Rolling
    template:
      metadata:
        labels:
          lb: ${DATABASE_NAME}-pgpool
          role: queryrouter
          cluster: ${DATABASE_NAME}
      spec:
        containers:
        - name: edb-pgpool
          env:
          - name: DATABASE_NAME
            value: ${DATABASE_NAME} 
          - name: PGPORT
            value: ${PGPORT} 
          - name: REPL_USER
            value: ${REPL_USER} 
          - name: ENTERPRISEDB_PASSWORD
            value: 'postgres' 
          - name: REPL_PASSWORD
            value: 'postgres' 
          - name: ACCEPT_EULA
            value: ${ACCEPT_EULA}
          image: containers.enterprisedb.com/edb/edb-pgpool:v3.5
          imagePullPolicy: IfNotPresent
          readinessProbe:
            exec:
              command:
              - /var/lib/edb/testIsReady.sh
            initialDelaySeconds: 60
            timeoutSeconds: 5
    triggers:
    - type: ConfigChange
- apiVersion: v1
  kind: DeploymentConfig
  metadata:
    name: ${DATABASE_NAME}-as10-0
  spec:
    replicas: 1
    selector:
      db: ${DATABASE_NAME}-as10-0 
    strategy:
      resources: {}
      rollingParams:
        intervalSeconds: 1
        maxSurge: 25%
        maxUnavailable: 25%
        timeoutSeconds: 600
        updatePeriodSeconds: 1
      type: Rolling
    template:
      metadata:
        creationTimestamp: null
        labels:
          db: ${DATABASE_NAME}-as10-0 
          cluster: ${DATABASE_NAME}
      spec:
        containers:
        - name: edb-as10 
          env:
          - name: DATABASE_NAME 
            value: ${DATABASE_NAME} 
          - name: DATABASE_USER 
            value: ${DATABASE_USER} 
          - name: DATABASE_USER_PASSWORD
            value: 'postgres' 
          - name: ENTERPRISEDB_PASSWORD
            value: 'postgres' 
          - name: REPL_USER
            value: ${REPL_USER} 
          - name: REPL_PASSWORD
            value: 'postgres' 
          - name: PGPORT
            value: ${PGPORT} 
          - name: RESTORE_FILE
            value: ${RESTORE_FILE} 
          - name: LOCALEPARAMETER
            value: ${LOCALEPARAMETER}
          - name: CLEANUP_SCHEDULE
            value: ${CLEANUP_SCHEDULE}
          - name: EFM_EMAIL
            value: ${EFM_EMAIL}
          - name: NAMESERVER
            value: ${NAMESERVER}
          - name: POD_NAMESPACE
            valueFrom:
              fieldRef:
                fieldPath: metadata.namespace
          - name: POD_NODE
            valueFrom:
              fieldRef:
                fieldPath: spec.nodeName 
          - name: POD_IP
            valueFrom:
              fieldRef:
                fieldPath: status.podIP 
          - name: ACCEPT_EULA
            value: ${ACCEPT_EULA}
          image: containers.enterprisedb.com/edb/edb-as:v10.3
          imagePullPolicy: IfNotPresent 
          readinessProbe:
            exec:
              command:
              - /var/lib/edb/testIsReady.sh
            initialDelaySeconds: 60
            timeoutSeconds: 5 
          livenessProbe:
            exec:
              command:
              - /var/lib/edb/testIsHealthy.sh
            initialDelaySeconds: 600 
            timeoutSeconds: 60 
          ports:
          - containerPort: ${PGPORT} 
          volumeMounts:
          - name: ${PERSISTENT_VOLUME}
            mountPath: /edbvolume
          - name: pg-initconf
            mountPath: /initconf
        dnsPolicy: ClusterFirst
        restartPolicy: Always
        volumes:
        - name: ${PERSISTENT_VOLUME}
          persistentVolumeClaim:
            claimName: ${PERSISTENT_VOLUME_CLAIM}
        - name: pg-initconf
          configMap:
            name: postgres-map
             
    triggers:
    - type: ConfigChange
parameters:
- name: DATABASE_NAME
  displayName: Database Name
  description: Name of Postgres database (leave edb for default)
  value: 'edb'
- name: DATABASE_USER
  displayName: Default database user (leave enterprisedb for default)
  description: Default database user
  value: 'enterprisedb'
- name: REPL_USER
  displayName: Repl user
  description: repl database user
  value: 'repl'
- name: PGPORT
  displayName: Database Port
  description: Database Port (leave 5444 for default)
  value: "5444"
- name: LOCALEPARAMETER
  displayName: Locale
  description: Locale of database
  value: ''
- name: CLEANUP_SCHEDULE
  displayName: Host Cleanup Schedule
  description: Standard cron schedule - min (0 - 59), hour (0 - 23), day of month (1 - 31), month (1 - 12), day of week (0 - 6) (0 to 6 are Sunday to Saturday, or use names; 7 is Sunday, the same as 0). Leave it empty if you dont want to cleanup.
  value: '0:0:*:*:*'
- name: EFM_EMAIL
  displayName: Email
  description: Email for EFM
  value: '[email protected]'
- name: NAMESERVER
  displayName: Name Server for Email
  description: Name Server for Email
  value: '8.8.8.8'
- name: PERSISTENT_VOLUME
  displayName: Persistent Volume
  description: Persistent volume name
  value: ''
  required: true
- name: PERSISTENT_VOLUME_CLAIM 
  displayName: Persistent Volume Claim
  description: Persistent volume claim name
  value: ''
  required: true
- name: RESTORE_FILE
  displayName: Restore File
  description: Restore file location
  value: ''
- name: ACCEPT_EULA
  displayName: Accept end-user license agreement (leave 'Yes' for default)
  description: Indicates whether user accepts the end-user license agreement
  value: 'Yes'
  required: true

Once you imported that into OpenShift (check here if you don’t know how to do that) you get a new template you can deploy from:

When you create a new deployment of that one (again, check here if you don’t know how to do that) you will notice several things when you login to the container once it is up and running:

dwe@dwe:~$ oc rsh edb-as10-0-1-gk8dt
sh-4.2$ psql postgres
psql.bin (10.3.8)
Type "help" for help.

postgres=# show work_mem;
 work_mem 
----------
 12MB
(1 row)

postgres=# show shared_buffers ;
 shared_buffers 
----------------
 56MB
(1 row)

First of all and this is what we wanted: The PostgreSQL instance came up with the parameters we specified in the ConfigMap. When you look at the volumes present in the container there is a new one named after what we specified in the template:

sh-4.2$ df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
none             18G  4.0G   14G  24% /
tmpfs          1002M     0 1002M   0% /dev
tmpfs          1002M     0 1002M   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/sda1        18G  4.0G   14G  24% /initconf
shm              64M   12K   64M   1% /dev/shm
tmpfs          1002M   16K 1002M   1% /run/secrets/kubernetes.io/serviceaccount

Inside that volume there is the postgresql.conf.in file we also specified in the template and that is linked to $PGDATA:

sh-4.2$ ls -la /initconf
total 12
drwxrwsrwx  3 root 1000070000 4096 May 18 09:55 .
drwxr-xr-x 85 root root       4096 May 18 09:55 ..
drwxr-sr-x  2 root 1000070000 4096 May 18 09:55 ..2018_05_18_09_55_19.162613490
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root         31 May 18 09:55 ..data -> ..2018_05_18_09_55_19.162613490
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root         25 May 18 09:55 postgresql.conf.in -> ..data/postgresql.conf.in

And finally we can confirm the content of that file:

sh-4.2$ cat /initconf/postgresql.conf.in 
work_mem='12MB'
shared_buffers='56MB'

You can do the same for pg_hba.conf by creating a new ConfigMap for pg_hba.conf.in. In the next post we’ll look at how EDB Failover Manager is configured inside the containers.