Ansible Roles for Patroni on Debian

This Ansible playbook allows to deploy a Patroni cluster.

It is an enhanced fork of credativ's playbook. It has these additional features:

• etcd tls authentication and transport over HTTPS support
• postgres and patroni TLS setup
• support multiple etcd endpoints
• support rerunning the roles/playbooks without messing up the cluster
• support for Hetzner Floating IPs
• additional documentation
• allow to define network that has can access postgres' replication
• structured in roles, so that you can use it from any playbook

There's a howto article on how to use this playbook.

This playbook is using the patroni packages provided by Debian and/or PostgreSQL's apt.postgresql.org repository.

Those packages have been integrated with Debian's postgresql-common framework and will look very similar to a regular stand-alone PostgreSQL install on Debian. This is done by using pg_createconfig_patroni creating setting the manual flag in the /etc/postgresql/$PG_VERSION/$CLUSTER_NAME/start.conf config file. That will cause the postgres init script/systemd unit not to start that cluster automatically. Instead patroni will take care to start and manage that cluster.

For production use it should be hardened to use Ansible Vault for secrets.

The default topology consists of one node (master) acting as the DCS (Distributed Consensus Store) server, and three PostgreSQL/Patroni nodes (pg1, pg2 and pg3), see inventory.

DCS Server

Patroni requires a DCS for leader election and as configuration store. Supported DCS server are Etcd, Consul and Zookeeper. If e.g. an Etcd cluster is already available, then it can be configured either by editing templates/dcs.yml or (if that suffices) by setting the dcs_server Ansible variable to its IP address.

Usage

Assuming password-less SSH access to the four nodes is configured, the playbook can be run as follows:

ansible-playbook -i inventory -e vars.yml patroni.yml

Supported Versions

The playbooks have been tested on Debian 9 (stretch), testing (buster) and unstable (sid), as well as Ubuntu LTS 18.04 (bionic). As the apt.postgresql.org PostgreSQL (and Patroni) packages are used, all supported PostgreSQL versions can be installed in principle.

Note that Consul is unsupported as DCS on Debian 9 (stretch).

Variables

There is a lot that can be configured. Have a look at vars.yml.

The following are a few useful variables that can be set:

• dcs (etcd (default), consul or zookeeper)
• dcs_servers_group (default: dcs_servers, name of the inventory group that contains the inventory_names of the dcs_servers)
• pgsql_servers_group (default: pgsql_servers, name of the inventory group that contains the inventory_names of the pgsql_servers)
• postgresql_cluster_name (default: test)
• postgresql_major_version (default: 11)
• postgresql_data_dir_base (default: /var/lib/postgresql)
• postgresql_network (default: network of default interface) network that access postgres and do queries. md5 auth is required.
• postgresql_repl_network (default: network of default interface) network that can do replication. md5 auth is required.
• patroni_replication_user (default: replicator)
• patroni_replication_pass
• patroni_postgres_pass
• patroni_config_template (default: patroni.yml.j2, will by default find the one inside patroni/templates)
• vip
• vip_mask (default: 32)
• vip_manager_hetzner* (configures Hetzner Floating or Failover IPs - see [vars.yml])
• use_certificates (applies to etcd DCS, patroni and postgres, default: false, see below)
• patroni_ca_dir (where to find certificates that need to be deployed, only needed when use_certificates: true)

Example: ansible-playbook -i inventory -i @vars.yml patroni.yml

For further configuration and understanding it might be useful to consult the patroni configuration settings documentation. It might be necessary to modify the patroni template accordingly.

Also please see patroni/patroni#878 (comment) to understand how patroni settings propagate.

Running multiple instances of Patroni/PostgreSQL

By default, Patroni uses 8008 as the API REST port. The automatic Patroni configuration generation will increment this for every additional cluster, so running

ansible-playbook -i inventory -e postgresql_cluster_name=test2 -e @vars.yml --tags=config pgsql-server.yml

will result in a second cluster, 11/test2 using PostgreSQL port 5433 and Patroni API port 8009.

Managing a virtual IP address with vip-manager

The vip-manager package allows to expose a virtual IP address (VIP) for the leader node by monitoring the leader key in the DCS and setting or removing the configured VIP for the local node depending on leader status.

When the vip variable is set to an IP address, an appropriate configuration file for vip-manager will be written and the cluster-specific vip-manager service will be started.

This playbook expects the systemd unit files for vip-manager to use it's -config parameter instead of listing all settings on the command line. That way vip-manager settings can be configured in its configuration yaml file.

This fork of the Debian package for vip-manager supports passing the configuration in the systemd unit file via the -config parameter.

TLS

Setting use_certificates: true (see patroni.yml for details) will:

• switch on using X.509 certificates for etcd authentication and TLS based communications encryption with etcd

• setup TLS encrypted patroni <-> postgres communication

• enable TLS based connections for postgres (plain connections will still be allowed)

Per host, each of the services above will get the same certificates, that is the ca certificate, the host certificate and certificate key.

If you set use_certificates: true then you will need a vip-manager that supports authentication, like f.ex this fork of vip-manager. Build instructions for a Debian package are here.

You will need to:

• either use externally generated certificates or
• or you can let this playbook generate a CA and certificates

If you want to let this playbook generate the CA and certificates, then you need to:

• uncomment the line:

  - import_playbook: certificates.yml
  

  in patroni.yml

• configure certificates.yml

• install the required tpo.local_certificate_authority role like this:

  ansible-galaxy install tpo.local_certificate_authority
  

  make sure you get at least version 1.2.1 of that role.

• set patroni_ca_dir pointing to the directory that contains the CA.

Rewinding/Recloning outdated former primaries

If a failover has occured and the old leader has additional transactions that do not allow for a clean change of timeline, pg_rewind can be used in order to rewind the old leader so that it can reinitiate streaming replication to the new leader. For this to happen, the variable patroni_postgres_pass needs to be set in vars.yml. If this is not the case, a full reclone will be done.

In both cases, the former primary's data directory will be gone, so if you prefer to have the primary stay down for manual inspection instead, you should comment out (or set to false) the parameters use_pg_rewind, remove_data_directory_on_rewind_failure and remove_data_directory_on_diverged_timelines.