Relational Data at the Edge: How Cloudflare Operates Distributed PostgreSQL Clusters

Cloudflare operates distributed PostgreSQL clusters at the edge and faces challenges in storing and managing relational data. They prioritize high availability, use logical and streaming replication, and utilize cluster management systems like stolon. Connection pooling and load balancing techniques are employed to optimize performance. Cloudflare has experienced major incidents and has learned important lessons for optimizing database resynchronization. They also discuss embedding data at the edge, colocation of storage and compute, and data localization challenges.