Understanding services components

[Remi Joulins]

Hello,

I would like understanding services deployed in the postregsql cluster and I don't find lots of information.

With the version 5.3.2, I have 6 services but I don't understand their functions :

- hippo-ha : ??

- hippo-ha-config : ??

- hippo-pgbouncer : connect to my cluster's connection pooler

- hippo-pods : ??

- hippo-primary : To connect on the primary pod with role Leader in my cluster

- hippo-replica : Is it to connect read only to my cluster ? If yes, on which pod ? The one who has the role of replica ?

Thanks,

Rémi

[Andrew L'Ecuyer]

Hi Remi,

I recommend checking out the following docs, which touch on the Services a bit:

https://access.crunchydata.com/documentation/postgres-operator/latest/tutorials/basic-setup/connect-cluster

More specifically, you'll see that many of these are for configuration purposes only.  E.g., as described in this section:

"You do not need to worry about most of these Services, as they are used to help manage the overall health of your Postgres cluster. For the purposes of connecting to your database, the Service of interest is called hippo-primary. Thanks to PGO, you do not need to even worry about that, as that information is captured within a Secret!"

And to answer your questions around some of the other services you're seeing out there:

• hippo-ha: This service is managed directly by the High-Availability (HA) system, and routes traffic to the primary/leader.
• hippo-ha-config: This service is simply used to manage cluster-wide configuration settings, specifically via the associated Endpoints resource.
  
• hippo-pgbouncer:  As you mentioned, this service routes traffic to the connection pooler (PgBouncer).
• hippo-primary: As you mentioned, this service routes traffic to the current primary/leader.  Specifically, this Service provides a convenient DNS name with "primary" in it for connecting to the current primary/leader.
• hippo-replica: As you mentioned, this service routes traffic to PG replicas within your cluster (i.e., instances with the replica role).

Hope this helps!

Also, I do recommend asking any follow-up questions in Crunchy's new Discord server, e.g. to get further visibility across the full PGO user community.  Additional details (including a link to sign-up) can be found in the following post:

https://groups.google.com/a/crunchydata.com/g/postgres-operator/c/s8DRWtG1nrs

Thanks!

Andrew