Overview
DBaaS for PostgreSQL is fully integrated into the Data Center Designer and has a dedicated API. You may also launch it via automation tools like Terraform and Ansible.
Compatibility: DBaaS gives you access to the capabilities of the PostgreSQL database engine. This means that the code, applications, and tools you already use today with your existing databases can be used with DBaaS. IONOS Cloud currently supports PostgreSQL versions 12, 13, 14, and 15.
Locations: As of December 2022, DBaaS is offered in all IONOS Cloud Locations.
Features
Scalable: Fully managed clusters that can be scaled on demand.
High availability: Multi-node clusters with automatic node failure handling.
Security: Communication between clients and the cluster is encrypted using TLS certificates from Let's Encrypt.
Upgrades: Customer-defined maintenance windows, with minimal disruption due to planned failover (approx. few seconds for multi-node clusters).
Backup: Base backups are carried out daily, with Point-in-Time recovery for one week.
Cloning: Customers also have the option to clone clusters via backups.
Restore: Databases can be restored in place or to a different target cluster.
Resources: Offered on Enterprise VM, with a dedicated CPU, storage, and RAM. Storage options are SSD or HDD, with SSD now including encryption-at-rest.
Network: DBaaS supports private LANs.
Extensions: DBaaS supports several PostgreSQL Extensions.
Platform Tasks
Note: IONOS Cloud doesn’t allow superuser access for PostgreSQL services. However, most DBA-type actions are still available through other methods.
DBaaS services offered by IONOS Cloud
Our platform is responsible for all back-end operations required to maintain your database in optimal operational health.
Database installation via the DCD or the DBaaS API.
Pre-set database configuration and configuration management options.
Automation of backups for a period of 7 days.
Regular patches and upgrades during maintenance.
Disaster recovery via automated backup.
Service monitoring: both for the database and the underlying infrastructure.
Customer database administration duties
Tasks related to the optimal health of the database remain the responsibility of the customer. These include:
Optimisation
Data organisation
Creation of indexes
Updating statistics
Consultation of access plans to optimize queries
Logs: The logs that are generated by a database are stored on the same disk as the database. We provide logs for connections, disconnections, waiting for locks, DDL statements, any statement that ran for at least 500 ms, and any statement that caused an error (see PostgreSQL documentation). Currently, we do not provide an option to change this configuration.
To conserve disk space, log files are rotated according to size. Logs should not consume more than 175 MB of disk storage. The files are continuously monitored and log messages are shipped to a central storage location with a retention policy of 30 days.
Write-Ahead Logs: PostgreSQL uses Write Ahead Logs (WAL) for continuous archiving and point-in-time recovery. These logs are created in addition to the regular logs.
Every change to the database is recorded in the WAL record. WALs are generated along with daily base backups and offer a consistent snapshot of the database as it was at that time. WALs and backups are automatically deleted after 7 days, which is the earliest point in time you can recover from. Please consult PostgreSQL WAL documentation for more information.
Password encryption: Client libraries must support SCRAM-SHA-256 authentication. Make sure to use an up-to-date client library.
Connection encryption: All client connections are encrypted using TLS; the default SSL mode is prefer and clients cannot disable it. Server certificates are issued by Let's Encrypt and the root certificate is ISRG Root X1. This needs to be made available to the client for verify-ca and verify-full to function.
Certificates are issued for the DNS name of the cluster which is assigned automatically during creation and will look similar to pg-abc123.postgresql.de-txl.ionos.com. It is available via the IONOS API as the dnsName property of the cluster resource.
Here is how to verify the certificate using the psql command line tool:
Resource usage
Calculating RAM Requirements: The RAM size must be chosen carefully. There is 1 GB of RAM reserved to capture resource reservation for OS system daemons. Additionally, internal services and tools use up to 500 MB of RAM. To choose a suitable RAM size, the following formula must be used.
ram_size = base_consumption + X * work_mem + shared_buffers
The
base_consumptionand reservation of internal services is approximately 1500 MB.X is the number of parallel connections. The value
work_memis set to 8 MB by default.The
shared_buffersis set to about 15% of the total RAM.
Calculating disk requirements
The requested disk space is used to store all the data that Postgres is working with, incl. database logs and WAL segments. Each Postgres instance has its storage (of the configured size). The operating system and applications are kept separately (outside of the configured storage) and are managed by IONOS.
If the disk runs full Postgres will reject write requests. Make sure that you order enough margin to keep the Postgres cluster operational. You can monitor the storage utilization in DCD.
WAL segments: In normal operation mode, older WAL files will be deleted once they have been replicated to the other instances and backed up to archive. If either of the two shipments is slow or failing then WAL files will be kept until the replicas and archive catch up again. Account for enough margin, especially for databases with high write load.
Log files: Database log files (175 MB) and auxiliary service log files (~100 MB) are stored on the same disk as the database.
Limitations
Connection Limits: The value for max_connections is calculated based on RAM size.
2GB
128
3GB
256
4GB
384
5GB
512
6GB
640
7GB
768
8GB
896
> 8GB
1000
The superuser needs to maintain the state and integrity of the database, which is why the platform reserves 11 connections for internal use: connections for superusers (see superuser_reserved_connections), for replication.
Note: The total upper limit for CPU cores, RAM, and Storage depends on your contract limits.
Backups: Storing cluster backups in an IONOS S3 Object Storage is limited to the last 7 days.
IP Ranges: The following IP ranges cannot be used with our PostgreSQL services:
10.208.0.0/1210.233.0.0/18192.168.230.0/2410.233.64.0/18
Performance considerations
Database instances are placed in the same location as your specified LAN, so network performance should be comparable to other machines in your LAN.
Estimates: A test with pgbench (scaling factor 1000, 20 connections, duration 300 seconds, not showing detailed logs) and a single small instance (2 cores, 3 GB RAM, 20 GB HDD) resulted in around 830 transactions per second (read and write mixed) and 1100 transactions per second (read-only). For a larger instance (4 cores, 8 GB RAM, 600GB Premium SSD) the results were around 3400 (read and write) and 19000 (read-only) transactions per second. The database was initialized using pgbench -i -s 1000 -h <ip> -U <username> <dbname>. For benchmarking the command line used was pgbench -c 20 -T 300 -h <ip> -U <username> <dbname> for the read/write tests, and pgbench -c 20 -T 300 -S -h <ip> -U <username> <dbname> for the read-only tests.
Note: To cite the pgbench docs: "It is very easy to use pgbench to produce completely meaningless numbers". The numbers shown here are only ballpark figures and there are no performance guarantees. The real performance will vary depending on your workload, the IONOS location, and several other factors.
Activate extensions
Available PostgreSQL extensions
There are several PostgreSQL extensions preinstalled, that you can enable for your cluster. You can enable the extension by logging into your cluster and executing:
The following table shows which extensions are enabled by default and which can be enabled (PostgreSQL version 12):
plpython3u
X
1.0
PL/Python3U untrusted procedural language
pg_stat_statements
X
1.7
track execution statistics of all SQL statements executed
intarray
1.2
functions, operators, and index support for 1-D arrays of integers
pg_trgm
1.4
text similarity measurement and index searching based on trigrams
pg_cron
1.3
Job scheduler for PostgreSQL
set_user
3.0
similar to SET ROLE but with added logging
timescaledb
2.4.2
Enables scalable inserts and complex queries for time-series data
tablefunc
1.0
functions that manipulate whole tables, including crosstab
pg_auth_mon
X
1.1
monitor connection attempts per user
plpgsql
X
1.0
PL/pgSQL procedural language
pg_partman
4.5.1
Extension to manage partitioned tables by time or ID
hypopg
1.1.4
Hypothetical indexes for PostgreSQL
postgres_fdw
X
1.0
foreign-data wrapper for remote PostgreSQL servers
btree_gin
1.3
support for indexing common datatypes in GIN
pg_stat_kcache
X
2.2.0
Kernel statistics gathering
citext
1.6
data type for case-insensitive character strings
pgcrypto
1.3
cryptographic functions
earthdistance
1.1
calculate great-circle distances on the surface of the Earth
postgis
3.2.1
PostGIS geometry and geography spatial types and functions
cube
1.4
data type for multidimensional cubes
Note: With select * from pg_available_extensions; you will see more available extensions, but many of them can't be enabled or used without superuser rights and thus aren't listed here.
Resource allocation
The database resources allocated as per your user contract are displayed in Resource allocation. The resources refer to the Postgres Clusters, number of CPU cores, RAM, and Storage databases quota:
16 CPU Cores
32 GB RAM
10 database clusters
1500 GB Disk Space
5 instances within each cluster
You can view the number of resources that are available and can be used, as well as the number of resources already consumed. Based on the resources available here, you can allocate resources during the creation of a database cluster. For resource allocation, contact IONOS Cloud Support.
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