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Designing Layered High‑Availability Architectures for PostgreSQL on a Budget #16

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@umairshahid

Title

Designing Layered High‑Availability Architectures for PostgreSQL on a Budget

Abstract

I just gave this talk at SREcon26 Americas last week. It walks through a layered HA model for PostgreSQL that helps infrastructure teams make incremental, budget-conscious reliability decisions instead of over-engineering or doing nothing. Happy to bring it to Austin DevOps. I have also attached the slide deck here for your reference; it took 35 minutes to deliver at the conference.

20260326 - SREcon26 Americas - Designing Layered High‑Availability Architectures for PostgreSQL on a Budget.pdf

This presentation talks about high availability for PostgreSQL by treating it as a layered set of replication and failover patterns. Many teams deploy synchronous replication without understanding its trade‑offs or rely on single‑region clusters that can’t survive a data‑center outage. Worse, budget constraints often force compromises that jeopardise recovery objectives. The talk proposes a framework for composing HA layers - local synchronous replication, asynchronous standbys, hot standbys and cross‑region disaster‑recovery nodes - to meet specific RPO/RTO targets while controlling costs. It will cover practical experiences from multiple deployments where achieving four-nines availability was critical, yet enterprise clustering licences were not an option.

Duration

other (add detail in abstract)

Requested Date

April 15, 2026

Speaker Bio

Umair Shahid is the Founder & CEO of Stormatics, a specialist database services firm built to Elevate PostgreSQL in production. He works with fintechs, SaaS companies, and enterprises to design and run production-grade systems: resilient architectures, performance under load, security hardening, and migrations from proprietary databases across cloud and on-prem environments.

With more than two decades in the ecosystem, Umair is a subject matter expert who is regularly invited to speak at industry conferences. He publishes practical blogs and benchmark-driven white papers reaching more than 15,000 readers each month.

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