Could you briefly introduce yourself?

I'm Oleksii, and I work as a database engineer by Zalando. I am based in Berlin and with Zalando for almost five years, working with Postgres every day and developing tools to automate everyday DBA tasks. Before Zalando I worked at Command Prompt as a Postgres developer and DBA, doing, among other things, an in-built binary replication called Mammoth Replicator.

Have you enjoyed previous pgconf.eu or FOSDEM conferences, either as attendee or as speaker?

I've visited all pgconf.eu conferences since Prague, except 2015 in Vienna, and spoke three times: in 2012, Prague, in 2014, Madrid and 2016, Tallinn. As for FOSDEM, I've been there twice and spoke once in 2016.

What will your talk be about, exactly? Why this topic?

My talk is dedicated to building a database-as-a-service solution based on Kubernetes. Together with Jan Mussler, my colleague from Zalando, we are going to describe how to reliably run Postgres databases on Kubernetes, automate common DBA tasks and make sure that Kubernetes cluster upgrades don't cause unnecessary downtimes of Postgres databases running there. Kubernetes is a hot topic among both devs and ops; however, there is a lot of scepticism for running stateful applications, especially databases, there. We will show how we do it, share our open-source tools and encourage others to join and innovate.

What is the audience for your talk?

I think this talk will be very relevant for people already running Kubernetes; although, anyone who aims to provide a scalable and flexible database service can benefit from it.

What existing knowledge should the attendee have?

Familiarity with Kubernetes and some experience of running Postgres at scale will help, although not required. We expect some knowledge of Postgres and built-in replication from our audience.