Split-Brain, ContainerD, Quarkus and a Postgres Cloud Control Plane
Show notes
An airhacks.fm conversation with Alvaro Hernandez (@ahachete) about: discussion about the quarkus Insights episode "#337 The Database Cloud" stackgres live demo, StackGres as a Quarkus and GraalVM native kubernetes operator for running Postgres, comparing CloudNativePG (CNPG) by EnterpriseDB to StackGres, Patroni for Postgres high availability, the split-brain risk of relying on Kubernetes and etcd alone, distributed consensus and leader lock election via etcd, why distributed systems and cryptography should not be self-implemented, async, synchronous and quorum (semi-synchronous) Postgres replication trade-offs, cascading and cross-region replication topologies, the false-positive problem and heuristic exceptions in two-phase commit, the ondb ("own your database") project for self-hosted Postgres, losing control with managed cloud services and untestable backups, vanilla unmodified Postgres on StackGres, the "Kubernetes without Kubernetes" (Kubeless) pattern, talking directly to ContainerD through the CRI API, runc and the Docker to ContainerD chain, a self-contained native binary that embeds ContainerD over Unix domain sockets, the slony node-local component named after the Postgres slonik elephant mascot, the Matriarch orchestrator component, reverse gRPC tunnels with Slonies phoning home across NAT and firewalls, a multi-tenant cloud control plane provided as a service, curl-pipe-shell node installation with a token, end-to-end encrypted Postgres protocol tunneling for JDBC from anywhere, psql compiled to wasm in the web console, Tailscale-inspired user experience, unifying nodes, Kubernetes clusters and cloud pools as resources, Slony Kubernetes controller, Java 25 source-mode scripting without dependencies, implementing your own MCP server for Postgres JDBC metadata, the Goose agentic UI donated by Block to the Linux Foundation, AI Rails BCE, Java, Web Components skills
Alvaro Hernandez on twitter: @ahachete