🔥 The DB Grill 🔥

Ah, yes. Another masterpiece of modern engineering. I have to commend the authors. Truly. It takes a special kind of optimistic bravery to write a blog post that so elegantly details how to build a perfectly precarious house of cards and call it a "solution."

My compliments to the chef for this recipe. You start with the delightful simplicity of a standalone, local setup. It’s a beautiful tutorial, really. Everything just works. The commands are clean, the YAML is crisp. It gives you that warm, fuzzy feeling, like you've really accomplished something. It's the "Hello, World!" of data loss, a gentle introduction before we get to the main event.

And what a main event it is! Moving this little science fair project into Kubernetes. Brilliant. I particularly admire the decision to add a self-hosted, stateful service—MinIO—as a critical dependency for restoring our other self-hosted, stateful service, PostgreSQL. What could possibly go wrong? It’s a bold strategy, replacing a globally-replicated, infinitely-scalable, managed object store that costs pennies with something that I now get to manage, patch, and troubleshoot. We've effectively created a backup system that requires its own backup system. Peak DevOps.

I can already see the sheer, unadulterated genius of this playing out. It will be a convoluted cascade of config-map catastrophes. I'm picturing it now: 3 AM on Labor Day weekend. The primary PostgreSQL instance has vaporized itself, as they sometimes do. No problem, I think, I’ll just follow this handy guide.

• First, I’ll discover the backup sidecar container has been crash-looping for three weeks because of an OOM kill, a detail our monitoring—which I'm sure this article details how to set up—somehow missed.
• But let's assume a backup did run. I’ll then find that the Persistent Volume Claim for the MinIO pod is stuck in a Pending state because the one node with the right affinity labels is down for maintenance.
• Or my personal favorite, a particularly pernicious permissions problem where the Kubernetes service account for the restore job can’t pull the secret needed to talk to the MinIO API, because someone updated our RBAC policies three months ago.

The prose here is just so confident. It whispers sweet nothings about S3 compatibility. “It’s just like S3,” it coos, “except for all the undocumented edge cases in the authentication API that will make your restore script fail with a cryptic XML error.”

configure and use MinIO as S3-compatible storage for managing PostgreSQL backups

That phrase, "S3-compatible," is my absolute favorite. I’ve heard it so many times. I have a whole collection of vendor stickers on my old laptop from "S3-compatible" solutions that no longer exist. I'm clearing a little space right between my beloved CoreOS and RethinkDB stickers for a MinIO one. You know, just in case.

Thanks for the article. I’ll be sure to read it again, illuminated by the cold, lonely glow of a terminal screen, while trying to explain to my boss why our "cost-effective" backup solution just ate the entire company.