High availability of Aiven for PostgreSQL®
Aiven for PostgreSQL® is available on a variety of plans, offering different levels of service availability. The selected plan defines the features available.
| Plan | Service availability features | Backup history |
|---|---|---|
| Hobbyist | Single node (limited availability) | 2 days |
| Startup | Single node (limited availability) | 2 days |
| Business | 1 primary node and 1 standby node (higher availability) | 14 days |
| Premium | 1 primary node and 2 standby nodes (top high availability characteristics) | 30 days |
Primary and standby nodes
Aiven's Business and Premium plans offer a primary node and standby nodes. A standby node is useful for multiple reasons:
- Provides another physical copy of the data in case of hardware, software, or network failures
- Typically reduces the data loss window in disaster scenarios
- Provides a quicker database time to restore with a controlled failover in case of failures as the standby is already installed, running, and synchronised with the data
- Can be used for read-only queries to reduce the load on the primary server
Failure handling
Minor failures
Minor failures, such as service process crashes or temporary loss of network access, are handled automatically by Aiven in all plans without any major changes to the service deployment. The service automatically restores normal operation once the crashed process is automatically restarted or when network access is restored.
Severe failures
Severe failures, such as losing a node entirely in case of hardware or severe software problems, require radical recovery measures. The Aiven monitoring infrastructure automatically detects a failing node when the node starts reporting issues in the self-diagnostics or when it stops communicating. In such cases, the monitoring infrastructure automatically schedules a new replacement node to be created.
In the event of database failover, the Service URI of your service remains the same; only the IP address changes to point to the new primary node.
Highly available Business and Premium service plans
When a standby node fails, the primary node keeps running normally and provides a normal service level to the client applications. Once the new replacement standby node is ready and synchronised with the primary node, it starts replicating the primary node in real time as the situation gets back to normal.
When a primary node fails, the combined information from the Aiven monitoring infrastructure and the standby node is used to make a failover decision. The standby node is promoted as the new primary and immediately starts serving clients. A new replacement node is automatically scheduled and becomes the new standby node.
If the primary node and all the standby nodes fail at the same time, new nodes are automatically scheduled for creation to become the new primary and standby. The primary node is restored from the latest available backup, which can involve some degree of data loss. Any write operations made since the backup of the latest WAL file are lost. Typically, this time window is limited to either five minutes or one WAL file.
The amount of time required to replace a failed node depends mainly on the selected cloud region and the amount of data to be restored.
In the case of partial loss of the cluster, the surviving node keeps on serving clients even during the recreation of the other node. This happens automatically and requires no administrator intervention.
Premium plans operate in a similar way as Business plans. The main difference comes when one of the standby nodes or the primary node fails. Premium plans have an additional, redundant standby node available, providing platform availability even in the event of losing two nodes. If the primary node fails, the Aiven monitoring infrastructure, using PGLookout, determines which of the standby nodes is the furthest along in replication (has the least potential for data loss) and does a controlled failover to that node.
Single-node Hobbyist and Startup service plans
Hobbyist and Startup plans provide a single node. When it's lost, Aiven immediately starts the automatic process of creating a new replacement node. The new node starts up, restores its state from the latest available backup, and resumes serving clients.
Since there is just a single node providing the service, the service is unavailable for the duration of the restoration. In addition, any write operations made since the backup of the latest WAL file are lost. Typically, this time window is limited to either five minutes or one WAL file.
For more information, go to Upgrade and failover procedures.