Faraway Replica - part 1

Managing Faraway Replicas in Big Animal:

You can create replicas in different active regions in your cloud. A great feature provided by Big Animal is that there is no limit on the number of faraway replicas for each cluster. However, the addition of resources and data transfers can increase your cloud costs.

Create a faraway Replica:

Below are the steps for creating replicas in your cloud.

1. Go to the clusters page, You will see a list of previously created clusters.
2. Select the Create replica icon next to a cluster to create its faraway replica. You will be shown a create faraway replica page.
3. You cannot edit your cloud provider details because they are automatically inherited.
4. Move to the cluster setting tab and enter a name for the replica in the cluster name field.
5. Skip to the region section and select any of the active regions where you will be deploying your replica. The password and database type values are inherited from the source cluster.
6. Select the instance type in the instance type section.
7. Select the storage settings in the storage section.
8. In the networking section you can also specify whether you want to use private or public networking.
9. On the DB configuration tab keep the inherited values or increase them to avoid any kind of replication issues.
   • max_connections
   • max_locks_per_transaction
   • max_prepared_transactions
   • max_wal_senders
   • max_worker_processes

10. On the additional settings tab, in the backups section, change the default replica backup retention period of 30 days using the retention time controls. You can configure the retention period as follows:

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

11. Enable identity and access management authentication to turn on the ability to log in to Postgres using your AWS IAM credentials.

12. Select Create Replica and your replica will be created.

Promote a faraway replica:

You can also promote a faraway replica to a full-fledged cluster, which makes it capable of accepting writes. The new cluster created is different from the source cluster and it doesn't replace the source cluster.

1. Go to the clusters page. You will be able to see previously created clusters.
2. Select the cluster with the replica you want to promote. In the overview tab, you can see cluter's replica under faraway replicas.
3. Select Promote Faraway Replica icon next to the replica you want to promote.
4. The cluster settings are populated with values inherited from the source cluster. You can edit the cluster settings while creating your cluster.
5. Select promote replica

References:

1. https://www.postgresql.org/docs/
2. https://www.enterprisedb.com/docs/biganimal/latest/using_cluster/managing_replicas/