PostgreSQL Load Balancing in the Cloud Made Easy

We’d mentioned many times the advantages of using a Load Balancer in your database topology. It could be for redirecting traffic to healthy database nodes, distribute the traffic across multiple servers to improve performance, or just to have a single endpoint configured in your application for an easier configuration and failover process.

Now with the new ClusterControl 1.7.6 version, you can not only deploy your PostgreSQL cluster directly in the cloud, but also you can deploy Load Balancers in the same job. For this, ClusterControl supports AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure as cloud providers. Let’s take a look at this new feature.

Creating a New Database Cluster

For this example, we’ll assume that you have an account with one of the supported cloud providers mentioned, and configured your credentials in a ClusterControl 1.7.6 installation.

If you don’t have it configured, you must go to ClusterControl -> Integrations -> Cloud Providers -> Add Cloud Credentials.

Here, you must choose the cloud provider and add the corresponding information.

This information depends on the cloud provider itself. For more information, you can check our official documentation.

You don’t need to access your cloud provider management console to create anything, you can deploy your Virtual Machines, Databases, and Load Balancers directly from ClusterControl. Go to the deploy section and select “Deploy in the Cloud”.

Specify vendor and version for your new database cluster. In this case, we’ll use PostgreSQL 12.

Add the number of nodes, cluster name, and database information like credentials and server port.

Choose the cloud credentials, in this case, we’ll use an AWS account. If you don’t have your account added into ClusterControl yet, you can follow our documentation for this task.

Now you must specify the virtual machine configuration, like operating system, size, and region.

In the next step, you can add Load Balancers to your Database Cluster. For PostgreSQL, ClusterControl supports HAProxy as Load Balancer. You need to select the number of Load Balancer nodes, instance size, and the Load Balancer information. 

This Load Balancer information is:

• Listen Port (Read/Write): Port for read/write traffic.
• Listen Port (Read-Only): Port for read-only traffic.
• Policy: It can be:
  • leastconn: The server with the lowest number of connections receives the connection
  • roundrobin: Each server is used in turns, according to their weights
  • source: The source IP address is hashed and divided by the total weight of the running servers to designate which server will receive the request

Now you can review the summary and deploy it.

ClusterControl will create the virtual machines, install the software, and configure it, all in the same job and in an unattended way.

You can monitor the creation process in the ClusterControl activity section. When it finishes, you will see your new cluster in the ClusterControl main screen.

If you want to check the Load Balancers nodes, you can go to ClusterControl -> Nodes -> HAProxy node, and check the current status.

You can also monitor your HAProxy servers from ClusterControl by checking the Dashboard section.

Now you are done, you can check your cloud provider management console, where you will find the Virtual Machines created according to your selected ClusterControl job options.

Conclusion

As you could see, having a Load Balancer in front of your PostgreSQL cluster in the cloud is really easy using the new ClusterControl “Deploy in the Cloud” feature, where you can deploy your Databases and Load Balancer nodes in the same job.