teleport

A trigger-based Postgres replicator that performs DDL migrations by diffing schema changes and replicating real-time data changes based on DML triggers. In other words, a complete replicator that works without any special permissions on the database, just like the ones you don't have in AWS RDS.

Yes, you read it right

How it works

In a configurable time interval, teleport diffs the current schema and replicate new tables, columns, indexes and so on from the source to the target. Inserted, updated or deleted rows are detected by triggers on the source, which generate events that teleport transform into batches for the appropriate targets.

If teleport fails to apply a batch of new/updated rows due to a schema change that is not reflected on target yet, it will queue the batch, apply the schema change and then apply the failed batches again. This ensures consistency on the data even after running migrations and changing the source schema.

Currently only source databases with Postgres versions >= 9.2.16 are supported.

Features

All the features above are replicatable by teleport:

• INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE rows
• Tables/columns
• Composite types
• Enums
• Schemas
• Functions
• Indexes
• Extensions

Install

go get -u github.com/pagarme/teleport

Getting started

Each running instance of teleport is responsible for managing a host, exposing a HTTP API to receive batches from other instances. For a master-slave replication you should run one teleport instance for the source host (master) and other for the target host (slave), and set the API of the target as the destination for the data fetched from the source.

Configuring the source instance

For the source, create a config file named source_config.yml:

batch_size: 10000
processing_intervals:
  batcher: 100
  transmitter: 100
  applier: 100
  vacuum: 500
  ddlwatcher: 5000
database:
  name: "finops-db"
  database: "postgres"
  hostname: "postgres.mydomain.com"
  username: "teleport"
  password: "root"
  port: 5432
server:
  hostname: "0.0.0.0"
  port: 3000
targets:
  my-target:
    target_expression: "public.*"
    endpoint:
      hostname: "target.mydomain.com"
      port: 3001
    apply_schema: "test"

For each target under the targets section, it's possible to define a target_expression, which defines what tables will be replicated. The expression should be schema-qualified.

You should also set a apply_schema, which defines in what schema the data will be applied in the target, and a endpoint of the target teleport instance.

Configuring the target instance

For the target, create a config file named target_config.yml:

batch_size: 10000
processing_intervals:
  batcher: 100
  transmitter: 100
  applier: 100
  vacuum: 500
  ddlwatcher: 5000
database:
  name: "my-target"
  database: "postgres"
  hostname: "postgres-replica.mydomain.com"
  username: "teleport"
  password: "root"
  port: 5432
server:
  hostname: "target.mydomain.com"
  port: 3001

You may have noted this config file does not include a targets section, simply because this instance will not be the source for any host. You can, however, use a instance as both source and target by simply including a targets section.

Initial load

It's possible to generate initial-load batches on the source that will be transmitted to the target. To do a initial-load, run on source:

$ teleport -config source_config.yml -mode initial-load -load-target my-target

This will create batches on the source that will be transmitted to my-target as soon as teleport starts running.

Starting up

You may start instances before the end of the initial load. This will replicate data as it's extracted from the source to the target, and further modifications will be replicated and applied later on.

On source, teleport will diff, group and batch events and transmit batches to the target. On the target, batches will be applied on the same order as they ocurred on the source.

On source, run:

$ teleport -config source_config.yml

On target, run:

$ teleport -config target_config.yml

Teleport is now up and running! \o/

Performance

We've been using teleport to replicate a roughly large production database (150GB) with ~50 DML updates per second and performance is pretty satisfying. Under our normal load, each teleport instance uses ~150MB of memory and not significant CPU usage nor spikes.

As teleport relies on (very light) triggers for data replication, the source database performance may be slightly affected, but impacts were negligible for our use cases.

Initial load uses Postgres' COPY FROM to load data, which makes it very fast. The initial load of our entire 150GB database took under ~14 hours using the db.m4.xlarge RDS instance for source and target.

Tests

$ docker-compose run test

License

The MIT license.