EDB TPAexec

© Copyright EnterpriseDB UK Limited 2015-2022 - All rights reserved.

Confidential property of EDB; not for public release.

Overview

TPA (Trusted Postgres Architecture) is a set of recommendations from EDB (and formerly 2ndQuadrant) about how to set up a Postgres cluster in various scenarios. These represent the best practices followed by EDB, and are as applicable to quick testbed setups as to production environments.

TPAexec is an orchestration tool that uses Ansible to build Postgres clusters according to EDB's recommendations.

What can TPAexec do?

With TPAexec, you can:

1. Provision hosts and other resources on AWS and other platforms, including existing (already-provisioned or bare metal) servers.

2. Configure the operating system (tweak kernel settings, install packages, create users, set up password-less ssh between hosts…)

3. Deploy Postgres, BDR, pglogical, Postgres extensions (from source or packages), repmgr and Barman, etc.

4. Run automated tests on the cluster after deployment

TPAexec will generate an initial configuration for the type of cluster you want. You can use this default configuration straightaway, or edit it to suit your needs. In most cases, this simple text configuration file is all you will need to set up your cluster.

If you ever need to extend the functionality of TPAexec, the full range of Ansible functionality is at your disposal.

Installation

To use TPAexec, you need to install tpaexec and run the tpaexec setup command. Please use the TPAexec packages if they are available for your platform.

If you have an EDB Github account that gives you access to the TPAexec repository, and you want to use TPAexec on MacOS X or another platform for which packages are not available, you can install it from source or run it inside a Docker container.

How do I use it?

Select an architecture for your cluster, e.g., M1 (a Postgres cluster with a single primary and multiple replicas), and do something like this:

# Generate an initial configuration for the cluster. This command
# accepts many options. See 'tpaexec info architectures/M1' and
# 'tpaexec help configure-options' for more details.
tpaexec configure clustername --architecture M1

# You can examine the generated clustername/config.yml here, and edit it
# if you want to, or just stick with the defaults.

# Now bring up the cluster
tpaexec provision clustername
tpaexec deploy clustername
tpaexec test clustername

# (Remember to destroy the cluster when you're done with it.)
tpaexec deprovision clustername

For more details, please consult the installation instructions and documentation.

Write to tpa@enterprisedb.com for help.