PostgreSQL¶

As with S3-compatible storage, most Fediverse platforms require a PostgreSQL database instance where much of the instance data is stored. Despite the importance of the performance of the database to that of the overall instance, you can save a lot of up-front cost by starting small and cloning to a larger machine as you grow.

We use a Google CloudSQL PostgreSQL instance, selecting the smallest possible machine (db-f1-micro) and set the storage to auto-grow.

You will need to ensure that you enable the Private IP interface for the instance so the GKE cluster can reach it. We did not enable the CloudSQL Auth Proxy - we may eventually do that at some point.

We chose to create a separate database and user for each platform, rather than piling everything into the default postgres one.