The Need for Speed: Mastering WAL-G for High-Performance Backup & Recovery on Kubernetes
Thursday, June 25 at 11:20–12:10
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Sudeepta Patra has worked with databases for most of her career. She began at Ericsson, India, working with large-scale data systems, and later moved to Germany to pursue a Master’s degree in Software Engineering and Management. After her studies, she worked in the automotive sector on enterprise Oracle-based database applications.
For the past five years, Sudeepta has been part of STACKIT, where she was the first database engineer to work on building the managed PostgreSQL service on STACKIT Cloud from the ground up. She has played an integral role in the architecture, development, and scale-up of the service, which today runs thousands of production instances.
Running PostgreSQL on Kubernetes exposes standard backup strategies to the I/O limitations of networked storage. While WAL-G is widely adopted for cloud-native PostgreSQL, many implementations fail to leverage its most powerful storage and recovery optimizations.
This session examines the architecture of high-performance, resilient recovery systems. We will begin with WAL-G's internals, detailing precisely how Delta Backups and ZSTD compression reduce storage footprints and I/O overhead compared to traditional filesystem snapshots.
The discussion will then deep-dive into the mechanics of rapid restoration. We will analyze how to configure WAL prefetching for accelerated Point-in-Time Recovery (PITR) and leverage S3-compatible storage to maximize throughput. The outcome is a technical blueprint for the rapid restoration of terabyte-scale databases.
Key Takeaways: Delta Backup Mechanics: Understanding WAL-G's block-level tracking logic and its specific I/O advantages over snapshots for large datasets. PITR Acceleration: Mastering WAL prefetching techniques to significantly reduce recovery duration. Storage Optimization: Leveraging ZSTD compression and efficient S3 object storage protocols to minimize overhead. Automated Verification: Implementing wal-verify to continuously validate backup integrity and recoverability.
