Crunchy Data Container Suite Packages PostgresSQL

PostgreSQL databases can now be run and managed on Linux containers in cloud-native architectures with the release to the open source community of a database container suite.

Open source PostgresSQL specialist Crunchy Data announced its embraced of distributed cloud applications during this week’s Red Hat Summit in San Francisco. The company said its container suite, a set of Docker containers and Kubernetes orchestration services for running PostgresSQL databases, would run in cloud native Kubernetes settings along with a batch of management micro-services.

The company also announced Tuesday (June 28) it is joining the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. CNCF was launched last year to coordinate interface and other standards. By harmonizing container technologies and micro-services, the initiative aims to drive adoption of cloud native computing platforms that package software in containers, manage deployments and upgrades dynamically while enabling micro-services that allow faster delivery of enterprise applications.

The melding of the open source, object relational database with emerging container and orchestration tools along with Red Hat’s OpenShift container platform-as-a-service based on Docker and Kubernetes aims to hasten the migration of database management and operations to the cloud, the partners said.

Crunchy Data added that its suite includes a containerized version of Crunchy PostgreSQL 9.5 with the PostGIS extension, along with eight different PostgreSQL management micro-services packaged in containers.

The database vendor based in Charleston, S.C., said its open sourced PostgresSQL containers includes a means of running the database with PostGIS while performing backup restore. A separate backup feature handles the database container itself. Other features include the ability to generate HTML reports that provide detailed PostgresSQL log analysis along with the ability to collect 32 different database metrics from a container and push them to a Prometheus time series data store.

The company said its cloud-native shift was designed in part to address the problem of running a database in an “ephemeral container.” Crunchy Data CEO Bob Laurence said it addressed that issue through the containers suite, adding in a statement that “cloud native architectures are going to be very influential in the future of the IT stack, and we see a clear need for being able to incorporate the PostgreSQL database into those architectures.”

Along with its partnership with Red Hat on OpenShift deployment, the announcement also combines the open source database with cloud native infrastructure tools like Linux-based Docker containers and Kubernetes, the Google-backed orchestration tool that has emerge as among the most popular OpenStack implementations.

A survey released in April by the OpenStack Foundation found that application containers running on the cloud platform generated the most buzz among users. Kubernetes was the leading container and platform-as-a-service for managing OpenStack applications, ahead of CloudFoundry, OpenShift and Apache Mesos (in that order).

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