Governor: Postgres HA Orchestator
summary
Governor is a Postgres HA orchestrator that originally uses etcd + Python Governor to store WAL positions, run initialization races, and provide automatic leader election, failover and refollow; it works but scales poorly because HTTP retries to a central etcd create brief mass outages. The new design bakes Raft into each node using Go and canoe (Go raft wrapper) combining etcd‑raft and HashiCorp raft, shifting from polling to a subscription model and improving failover from 30 seconds vs near‑instant while adding quorum and operational complexity.
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chapters (11)
- 0:00Start
- 8:48Josh Deare
- 9:03What is Governor?
- 23:42Where are the weak points?
- 24:18Demonstration of Failure
- 25:58Failure starts when you can't trust the response from etcd
- 31:29Tradeoff: complexity
- 32:22Step one: research the RAFT world
- 33:55Step two: prototype with some RAFT libraries
- 34:54Step three: decide the best route from RAFT libraries
- 36:24Step five: use that abstraction to move Postgres through the logic flow
