High Availability & Backups

Single-instance databases have a single point of failure. If the underlying hardware has issues, your database goes down and your application goes with it. High availability solves this by maintaining a standby instance that takes over automatically when the primary fails. Setting this up yourself means configuring streaming replication, monitoring lag, building failover scripts, and testing recovery procedures. Gigalixir handles all of it. Run one command and Google Cloud SQL provisions a synchronous standby in a different availability zone. Failover happens automatically with minimal downtime.

One Command Setup: Enable HA with gigalixir pg:scale --high_availability=enabled. We provision the standby, configure synchronous replication, and set up automatic failover. Disable it the same way if you no longer need it.

Automatic Failover: When the primary instance becomes unavailable, Cloud SQL promotes the standby automatically. Your application reconnects to the same endpoint. No DNS changes. No manual intervention. No pager alerts at 3am.

Synchronous Replication: The standby receives every transaction before the primary commits. When failover happens, you don't lose data. The standby has everything the primary had.

Works With Read Replicas: High availability can be enabled independently on your primary database and each read replica. Protect your most critical databases without paying for HA on development or staging replicas.