Which kubernetes service should I connect to? about postgres-operator

[jmckulk]

hi @gregory-j-baker, thanks for reaching out.

I see where we are port-forwarding to the primary pod instead of the service in our quickstart guide. In our docs there is a note saying that the cluster-primary service should be used for the purposes of connecting to the database. I created an issue to update the guide to use the service instead of the primary pod. Either way, you should end up with the same connection.

There have been a few questions where users were confused about the services that are created with a PostgresCluster. I created an issue in our backlog to improve the documentation around Services. Over in the discord I put together the following reply:

There is a note about these services in the docs:

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!

Here is a more detailed description of the services:

• 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).
• hippo-pods: service created for the StatefulSet (see Headless Service limitation).

Hopefully, this helps until we can get the documentation updated.

[gregory-j-baker]

This is great, @jmckulk. Thank you so much.