Running Postgres Inside Kubernetes With Google Container Engine

I have been playing around with Kubernetes in the last week or so and have really started liking it. One of the main things I wanted to get running was Postgres inside of the cluster. This is particularly challenging because postgres requires a volume that sticks around with the docker container. If it doesn’t you will lose your data.

In researching this I found out kubernetes has a persistence manager that lets you mount Google Compute disks. This also works for AWS EBS volumes if your cluster is hosted over there.

Create the disk

gcloud compute disks create pg-data-disk --size 50GB

Make sure this will be in the same zone as the cluster.

Next attach the disk to an already running instance, possibly a new instance. We only need to temporarily attach the disk so we can format it.

gcloud compute instances attach-disk pg-disk-formatter --disk pg-data-disk

After the disk is attached, ssh into the instance and run the following commands. This will mount and then format the disk with ext4. Then we unmount the drive.

sudo /usr/share/google/safe_format_and_mount -m "mkfs.ext4 -F" /dev/sdb /media/pg-data/
sudo umount /media/pg-data/

gcloud compute instances detach-disk pg-disk-formatter --disk pg-data-disk

Set up Kubernetes

With all of this complete we can start on the kubernetes side. Create the following four files.

postgres-persistence.yml

apiVersion: v1
kind: PersistentVolume
metadata:
  name: pg-data-disk
  labels:
    name: pg-data-disk
spec:
  capacity:
    storage: 50Gi
  accessModes:
    - ReadWriteOnce
  gcePersistentDisk:
    pdName: "pg-data-disk"
    fsType: "ext4"

This creates a persistent volume that pods can mount. Set it up with the same information that you used to create the disk.

postgres-claim.yml

kind: PersistentVolumeClaim
apiVersion: v1
metadata:
  name: pg-data-claim
spec:
  accessModes:
    - ReadWriteOnce
  resources:
    requests:
      storage: 50Gi

This creates a claim on the persistent volume that pods will use to attach the volume. It should have the same information as above.

postgres-pod.yml

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: postgres
  labels:
    name: postgres
spec:
  containers:
    - name: postgres
      image: postgres
      env:
        - name: DB_PASS
          value: password
        - name: PGDATA
          value: /var/lib/postgresql/data/pgdata
      ports:
        - containerPort: 5432
      volumeMounts:
        - mountPath: /var/lib/postgresql/data
          name: pg-data
  volumes:
    - name: pg-data
      persistentVolumeClaim:
        claimName: pg-data-claim

There are a few important features of this file. We use the persistent claim in the volumes section and mount it in the volumeMounts section. Postgres doesn’t have it’s data dir at the top level of a mount so we move it lower with the environment variable PGDATA. You can also change the password with DB_PASS.

postgres-service.yml

apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: postgres
  labels:
    name: postgres
spec:
  ports:
    - port: 5432
  selector:
    name: postgres

This creates a service to easily access the postgres pod from other pods in the cluster. It creates a DNS entry pods can use to connect.

Create resources on Kubernetes

kubectl create -f postgres-persistence.yml
kubectl create -f postgres-claim.yml
kubectl create -f postgres-pod.yml
kubectl create -f postgres-service.yml

Run all of these commands and Postgres will be up and running inside your cluster.

Improvements

This works great accept for creating new databases. I had to attach to the running docker container to create new databases. This isn’t too bad, but could be a lot better.

It would also probably be better to create a replication controller instead of just a regular pod. That way if the pod died it would come back online by itself.

Overall kubernetes has been super fun to work with, especially the version hosted by Google.

Eric Oestrich