Creating a cluster

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Note

Before creating your cluster, make sure you have enough resources. Without enough resources, your request to create a cluster fails.

  1. Sign in to the BigAnimal portal.

  2. In the top right of the Overview or Clusters page, select Create New Cluster.

  3. On the Create Cluster page, specify the cluster settings on the following tabs:

  4. Select Create Cluster. It might take a few minutes to deploy.

Note

When you don't configure settings on optional tabs, the default values are used.

Cluster Info tab

  1. Select the type of cluster to deploy.

    • Single node creates a cluster with one primary and no standby replicas. Suited for test environments where high availability might not be required. You can create single-node clusters running EDB Postgres Advanced Server or PostgreSQL.

    • High availability creates a cluster with one primary and one or two standby replicas in different availability zones. You can create high-availability clusters running EDB Postgres Advanced Server or PostgreSQL. Only high-availability clusters allow you to enable read-only workloads for users. However, if you enable read-only workloads, then you might have to raise the IP address resource limits for the cluster.

    • Extreme high availability (Preview) creates a cluster, powered by EDB Postgres Distributed, with up to two data groups spread across multiple cloud regions. This cluster uses EDB Postgres Distributed to deliver higher performance and faster recovery. See Creating an extreme high-availability cluster for instructions.

    See Supported cluster types for more information about the different cluster types.

    Note

    You can't switch from a single-node or high-availability cluster to an extreme high-availability cluster or vice versa.

  2. Select the number of standby replicas for your high availability cluster.

  3. Select the cloud provider for your cluster. If you're using your own account and haven't connected it to BigAnimal yet, see Connecting to your cloud.

  4. Select Next: Cluster Settings to continue to specify the required settings for your cluster.

Cluster Settings tab

  1. In the Cluster Name field, enter the name for your cluster.

  2. In the Password field, enter a password for your cluster. This is the password for the user edb_admin.

  3. In the Database Type section:

    1. In the Postgres Type field, select the type of Postgres you want to use:

    2. In the Postgres Version list, select the version of Postgres that you want to use. See Database version policy for more information.

  4. In the Region section, select the region where you want to deploy your cluster.

    Tip

    For the best performance, we strongly recommend that this region be the same as your other resources that communicate with your cluster. For a list of available regions, see Supported regions. If you're interested in deploying a cluster to a region that isn't currently available, contact Support.

  5. In the Instance Type section:

    1. Select the category that works best for your applications and workload:

      • Memory optimized for large data sets

      • Compute optimized for compute bound applications

      • General purpose if you don't require memory or compute optimization

    2. Select the instance series and size. See Sizes for virtual machines in Azure or Amazon EC2 Instance Types for information to help you choose the appropriate instance type.

      Tip

      To maximize your disk size for AWS, select Rb5 as your instance and then io2 Block Express as your storage to get a maximum disk size of 64 TB and 256,000 IOPS.

  6. In the Storage section, from the Volume Type list, select your volume type.

    • For Azure, in Volume Type, select Premium SSD or Ultra Disk. Compared to Premium SSD volumes, ultra disks offer lower-latency, high-performance options and direct control over your disk's input/output operations per second (IOPS). For BigAnimal, we recommend using ultra disks for workloads that require the most demanding performance. See Using Azure ultra disks for more information.

      • For Premium SSD, in Volume Properties, select the type and amount of storage needed for your cluster. See Azure Premium SSD storage types for more information.

      • For ultra disk, in Volume Properties, select the disk size and IOPS for your cluster. BigAnimal calculates disk throughput based on your IOPS settings, but you have the option of updating the value.

        Important

        While setting the required IOPS for the disk that you selected, consider the VM limits that are tied to the VM size that you selected. See Ultra disk IOPS for more information.

    • For AWS, in Volume Type, select General Purpose SSD (GP3), io2, or io2 Block Express.

      Note

      io2 Block Express is available for selected instance types, such as R5b. However, you can't switch between io2 and io2 Block Express after creating your cluster.

      In Volume Properties, select the disk size for your cluster, and configure the IOPS.

  7. Networking section

    Specify whether to use private or public networking. Networking is set to Public by default. Public means that any client can connect to your cluster’s public IP address over the internet. Optionally, you can limit traffic to your public cluster by specifying an IP allowlist, which allows access only to certain blocks of IP addresses. To limit access, add one or more classless inter-domain routing (CIDR) blocks in the IP Allowlists section. CIDR is a method for allocating IP addresses and IP routing to a whole network or subnet. If you have any CIDR block entries, access is limited to those IP addresses. If none are specified, all network traffic is allowed.

    Private networking allows only IP addresses in your private network to connect to your cluster. See Cluster networking architecture for more information.

  8. To optionally make updates to your database configuration parameters, select Next: DB Configuration.

DB Configuration tab

In the Parameters section, you can update the value of the database configuration parameters as needed.

To update the parameter values, see Modifying your database configuration parameters.

For other optional settings, select Next: Additional Settings.

Additional Settings tab

Backups

Change the default database backup retention period of 30 days using the Retention Time controls in the Backups section. You can configure the retention period as follows:

  • 1 - 180 days
  • 1 - 25 weeks
  • 1 - 6 months

BigAnimal deletes backups older than the retention period.

Maintenance

Enable the Custom Maintenance Window option and use the controls to set a weekly 60-minute maintenance window in which maintenance upgrades occur for the cluster. If you don't set a window, the updates are applied at EDB's discretion with prior notification.

Note

Typically, maintenance updates take only a few minutes to complete.

For more information, see Periodic maintenance.

Connections

Note

The Read-only Workloads option is available only for high-availability cluster types.

Enable Read-only Workloads. This feature directs read-only operations exclusively toward replicas. If this option is enabled, you might have to raise the IP address resource limits for the cluster:

  • For Azure, the IP address quota is Standard Public IP Address.

  • For AWS, the IP address quota is Elastic IP. You might also have to increase the Network Load Balancers per Region value.

When enabling read-only workloads, keep in mind the following:

  • Read-only workloads are routed to Postgres physical standbys. Commands run on read-only workloads aren't filtered by BigAnimal. The connection is read-only because it runs on a standby replica where Postgres doesn't permit changes to the contents of database tables. A privileged connection to a standby replica can still execute other sensitive commands permitted by Postgres on standby replicas. For example, it can modify replication slots or Postgres configuration settings, terminate backends, see activity from other users, and more. We recommend that you use a Postgres role with minimal privileges for your application, even for read-only workloads.

  • Advisory locks aren't replicated between Postgres nodes, so advisory locks taken on a standby replica don't conflict with advisory locks taken on the primary or another standby replica. We recommend that applications that rely on advisory locking avoid using read-only workloads for those transactions.

For information on replication lag while using read-only workloads, see Standby replicas.

Authentication

Enable Identity and Access Management (IAM) Authentication to turn on the ability to log in to Postgres using your AWS IAM credentials. For this feature to take effect, after you create the cluster, you must add each user to a role that uses AWS IAM authentication in Postgres. For details, see IAM authentication for Postgres.

What’s next

After you create your cluster, use these resources to learn about cluster use and management:

Related CLI commands

For information on related CLI commands, see:

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