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Create a PostgreSQL server using Kubernetes tools

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Note

As a preview feature, the technology presented in this article is subject to Supplemental Terms of Use for Microsoft Azure Previews.

The latest updates are available in the release notes.

Prerequisites

You should have already created a data controller.

To create a PostgreSQL server using Kubernetes tools, you will need to have the Kubernetes tools installed. The examples in this article will use kubectl, but similar approaches could be used with other Kubernetes tools such as the Kubernetes dashboard, oc, or helm if you are familiar with those tools and Kubernetes yaml/json.

Install the kubectl tool

Overview

To create a PostgreSQL server, you need to create a Kubernetes secret to store your postgres administrator login and password securely and a PostgreSQL server custom resource based on the postgresqls custom resource definitions.

Create a yaml file

You can use the template yaml file as a starting point to create your own custom PostgreSQL server yaml file. Download this file to your local computer and open it in a text editor. It is useful to use a text editor such as VS Code that support syntax highlighting and linting for yaml files.

Example yaml file:

apiVersion: v1
data:
  username: <your base64 encoded username>
  password: <your base64 encoded password>
kind: Secret
metadata:
  name: pg1-login-secret
type: Opaque
---
apiVersion: arcdata.microsoft.com/v1beta3
kind: postgresql
metadata:
  name: pg1
spec:
  scheduling:
    default:
      resources:
        limits:
          cpu: "4"
          memory: 4Gi
        requests:
          cpu: "1"
          memory: 2Gi
  services:
    primary:
      type: LoadBalancer # Modify service type based on your Kubernetes environment
  storage:
    data:
      volumes:
      - className: default # Use default configured storage class or modify storage class based on your Kubernetes environment
        size: 5Gi
    logs:
      volumes:
      - className: default # Use default configured storage class or modify storage class based on your Kubernetes environment
        size: 5Gi

Customizing the login and password.

A Kubernetes secret is stored as a base64 encoded string - one for the username and one for the password. You will need to base64 encode an administrator login and password and place them in the placeholder location at data.password and data.username. Do not include the < and > symbols provided in the template.

You can use an online tool to base64 encode your desired username and password or you can use built in CLI tools depending on your platform.

PowerShell

[Convert]::ToBase64String([System.Text.Encoding]::UTF8.GetBytes('<your string to encode here>'))

#Example
#[Convert]::ToBase64String([System.Text.Encoding]::UTF8.GetBytes('example'))

Linux/macOS

echo -n '<your string to encode here>' | base64

#Example
# echo -n 'example' | base64

Customizing the name

The template has a value of pg1 for the name attribute. You can change this value but it must be characters that follow the DNS naming standards. If you change the name, change the name of the secret to match. For example, if you change the name of the PostgreSQL server to pg2, you must change the name of the secret from pg1-login-secret to pg2-login-secret

Customizing the resource requirements

You can change the resource requirements - the RAM and core limits and requests - as needed.

Note

You can learn more about Kubernetes resource governance.

Requirements for resource limits and requests:

  • The cores limit value is required for billing purposes.
  • The rest of the resource requests and limits are optional.
  • The cores limit and request must be a positive integer value, if specified.
  • The minimum of one core is required for the cores request, if specified.
  • The memory value format follows the Kubernetes notation.

Customizing service type

The service type can be changed to NodePort if desired. A random port number will be assigned.

Customizing storage

You can customize the storage classes for storage to match your environment. If you are not sure which storage classes are available, run the command kubectl get storageclass to view them. The template has a default value of default. This value means that there is a storage class named default not that there is a storage class that is the default. You can also optionally change the size of your storage. You can read more about storage configuration.

Creating the PostgreSQL server

Now that you have customized the PostgreSQL server yaml file, you can create the PostgreSQL server by running the following command:

kubectl create -n <your target namespace> -f <path to your yaml file>

#Example
#kubectl create -n arc -f C:\arc-data-services\postgres.yaml

Monitoring the creation status

Creating the PostgreSQL server will take a few minutes to complete. You can monitor the progress in another terminal window with the following commands:

Note

The example commands below assume that you created a PostgreSQL server named pg1 and Kubernetes namespace with the name arc. If you used a different namespace/PostgreSQL server name, you can replace arc and pg1 with your names.

kubectl get postgresqls/pg1 --namespace arc

kubectl get pods --namespace arc

You can also check on the creation status of any particular pod by running kubectl describe command. The describe command is especially useful for troubleshooting any issues. For example:

kubectl describe pod/<pod name> --namespace arc

#Example:
#kubectl describe pod/pg1-0 --namespace arc

Troubleshooting creation problems

If you encounter any troubles with creation, see the troubleshooting guide.